


The Path/Way Home

by josephina_x



Series: AU of Nicnac’s Any Family You Choose 'Verse [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: (again-and-still!), (this is all Nicnac’s fault), AU of an AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Any Family You Choose AU, Gen, Post-Series, Post-Weirdmageddon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 08:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29275170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: The business partnership continues!A twenty-seven-year-old interdimensional portal-jumping Dipper Pines is not about to let a conniving Jheselbraum strand him someplace for who knows how long, keeping him away from his family and sister. He's also not about to let a seventeen-year-old Stanley Pines continue to struggle to make ends meet, either.Dipperisgoing to get back home again, and he's not about to play damsel in distress, waiting for somebody else to come around and get him, either. Not if he can help it. --He can multi-task. He can get home again, while helping out this Stanley, too. This is doable... right?He may not be able to make these versions of his grunkle and great-uncle get back together again with itchy sweaters and sharing goats and a whole lot of hugging, especially not at seventeen years of age -- he's not Mabel. But there are other things that he knows he can do.
Relationships: Dipper Pines & Stan Pines
Series: AU of Nicnac’s Any Family You Choose 'Verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1221188
Comments: 8
Kudos: 26





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nicnac](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nicnac/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Any Family You Choose](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16891200) by [Nicnac](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nicnac/pseuds/Nicnac). 
  * Inspired by [Five Years Older](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8440027) by [Nicnac](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nicnac/pseuds/Nicnac). 



> Fic: The Path/Way Home  
> Fandom: Gravity Falls  
> Pairing: n/a  
> Rating: PG-13  
> Spoilers: through the end of the series, and some of the books (Journal #3)  
> Characters: Stan Pines, Dipper Pines, Other Gravity Falls Characters  
> Summary: The business partnership continues! 
> 
> A twenty-seven-year-old interdimensional portal-jumping Dipper Pines is not about to let a conniving Jheselbraum strand him someplace for who knows how long, keeping him away from his family and sister. He's also not about to let a seventeen-year-old Stanley Pines continue to struggle to make ends meet, either. 
> 
> Dipper _is_ going to get back home again, and he's not about to play damsel in distress, waiting for somebody else to come around and get him, either. Not if he can help it. --He can multi-task. He can get home again, while helping out this Stanley, too. This is doable... right? 
> 
> He may not be able to make these versions of his grunkle and great-uncle get back together again with itchy sweaters and sharing goats and a whole lot of hugging, especially not at seventeen years of age -- he's not Mabel. But there are other things that he knows he can do.  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit.  
> AN: (...guess who worked on stuff yet _again_ when she _still_ should’ve been working on other actual-work stuff…? uh-huh... x_x;;;;; )
> 
> I am ~~pretty sure that I am now~~ completely divergent to [Nicnac’s _Any Family You Choose_ GF fic (from her Chapter 3 onwards)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16891200/) as of the start of this fic, in terms of the events which occur (and not just Dipper’s backstory -- as a start, this Dipper is 27 not 53-ish). I was really trying not to turn this into a thing, but, well, stuff happens sometimes, I guess. (Ah, well?)
> 
> So that we have the in-fic timeline explained here: last fic, Dipper finds the book and meets Stan (buys shammies from him) on Day 1. Days 2-4 are days 1-3 of their partnership (after Dipper tracks Stan down on the night of Day 2). _This_ fic starts on the night of Day 5 (a.k.a. day 4 of their partnership) and progresses from there.
> 
> Since this fic is a complete divergence from Nicnac's _Any Family You Choose_ at this point, I made it into a separate fic. (You could potentially still pretend that it's a Dipper-centric continuation of Nicnac's [_Five Years Older_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8440027) fic, though, if you'd like ;)
> 
> As for a general timeline, I’m mostly going by what Nicnac specs out re: Gravity Falls. Specifically, for this fic, I’m going with Stan being 17 in late 1971 / early 1972, and getting kicked out of the house in spring of 1972 a bit before high school ends -- so, let’s say mid-April-ish? (That means that there’s decent enough weather for Stan to be accosting and selling things to folks outside, with school being out in late May -- y’know, _later_ ;)
> 
> I've basically been sitting on Chapter 1 for a v-e-r-y long time -- a little over two years! -- and (especially since I've finally started to work on writing Chapter 2 again) it's really about time that I post it to start with. (I kind of didn't want to before, for reasons that you'll see in a bit ;) but hey, I should get to be eeevil now and again sometimes, shouldn't I? *innocent look*)

\---

Dipper should’ve known that it would happen sooner or later. He just wasn’t expecting it to happen the fourth night into their business partnership.

\---

Stanley had somehow managed to sell every last piece of merchandise that Dipper had fixed to-date; it had left Stan’s motel room practically pristine on the third night of their partnership when Dipper had shown up with the ledger, except for a few bottles of leftover ‘fixed’ dye.

But today Stan must have spent most of the day looking for more things he could buy cheap to sell less-cheaply, because when Dipper came in that night to a room that had several new boxes in it, it was clear that Stan had gotten his hands on a bunch of ‘new product’, as it were.

From the looks of things, Stan had gotten himself several more crates of those ‘shammies’, and had dyed most of them already. (...Hopefully with the new fixed dye.) There was also a suspiciously-dented box that looked like it had probably fallen off the back of a truck, and when Dipper had opened it up, he’d sighed deeply.

The box had been full of “universal” TV remote controls, and upon trying a few of them out, one after the other? --The merchandise had needed _work_. Dipper hoped that Stan hadn’t paid too much for the box of dropped and damaged (thus generally unsellable) goods, because the fall wasn’t the only problem with them.

As far as Dipper could tell, the remotes hadn’t just fallen off the back of a truck; they’d been shoddily-made in the first place. He’d taken one apart, taken a multimeter to it, and realized that several internal connections had needed resoldering. ...And it was slow-going work, too, because (so far) Dipper had found that no two controllers had bad solder joints in the same places. He had to take the time to completely take apart every last controller, and then check the entire thing over with the multimeter to figure out what needed resoldering, before he could begin work on that piece.

Stan actually ended up finishing his own work in dyeing the rest of the remaining shammies before Dipper was even close to halfway through the box. He took a break to eat what Dipper had brought that night -- Italian food this time -- before wiping his hands off on a napkin and asking, “So, uh. How’s it going?”

“It’s going,” Dipper said with a grimace, from the desk and chair at which he sat, his soldering equipment surrounding him and the latest controller in front of him. “These controllers weren’t very well made. I’d recommend going with something different next time, if you can.”

At the long silence he received to his comment, he stopped what he was doing and glanced up at Stan, to see the frown on the teen’s face.

“You backing out?” Stan asked him, which left Dipper frowning himself.

“What?” Dipper blinked, because where had _that_ come from?

“You don’t want to do this, then just stop,” Stan said, crossing his arms and looking belligerent, but also more than a little stressed. “I don’t need you.”

Dipper let out a tired sigh, set down his soldering iron, and pushed himself back from the table. He hadn’t given the formula for the dye fixant to Stan yet, and he hadn’t yet shown Stan how to repair most of this himself. Stan would likely be back to selling junk very quickly, if Dipper walked out on him right now, but Dipper did not bother to argue the point. He knew it, and Stan knew it; he didn’t need to bring that up and rub it in Stan’s face. That would be counterproductive, to say the least.

“Stan, are we partners or aren’t we?” he tried instead, taking a different tack on the situation.

Stan eyed him almost as suspiciously as he had the first night. “I don’t know. Are we?”

Dipper scratched at the back of his head. “I’m pretty sure that was what we shook hands on,” he told Stan.

Stan looked down and away for a bit.

Finally, in flat tones, Stan said, “What do you want.”

Dipper’s eyebrows went up. “I want to be able to talk about good business practices with you,” he told Stan, leaning back in his chair. “Is that okay?”

Stan didn’t say anything.

Dipper sighed. “Look,” he told Stan, “This isn’t a productive use of my time--”

“Right.” Stan barked out a laugh, startling Dipper into silence. “I’m wasting your time!”

“...That’s not what I said,” Dipper began slowly, not sure where this all was coming from. Stan looked seriously on edge now, with the way he was holding himself.

“Yeah?” Stan challenged him. “Well then, what _is_ a ‘productive use of your time’, huh?”

“Working on the pitchforks,” Dipper told him simply, and that seemed to shock Stan out of whatever was going on with him for the moment. “Look, time is money. Right?” Dipper got a sinking feeling at the blank look he saw on Stan’s face again. It made him wonder if Grunkle Stan had started out this way, too, and when, exactly, he’d learned that. “...Okay, look. I can get five pitchforks fixed up in five minutes, right? It takes me ten minutes per controller,” Dipper told him, gesturing at the table. “I could be fixing ten pitchforks in the same time it’d take me to fix one of these controllers. --Would we make more profit selling ten pitchforks? Or selling one controller?”

Stan was frowning at him still, but now it was more of a thinking-processing frown.

“...I can probably sell one controller easier than ten pitchforks,” Stan said after awhile.

“But would you make more money doing that?” Dipper pressed him, before addressing Stan’s own comment: “And do you even know that for sure? --Have you sold these controllers to anyone before?” Stan grimaced. “Okay. So you can’t be sure how easy it will be to sell them yet. That means there’s more risk with the controllers, then.”

“More risk,” Stan said dubiously.

“It’s a new product,” Dipper explained. “You don’t know who to sell it to yet, who to target, who your audience is yet. You don’t even have a concrete pitch worked out for it yet, do you?” Dipper said, calling on several things that his Grunkle Stan had taught him and his sister about the Mystery Shack -- and selling in general -- years ago. “You might not even be able to sell any of them--”

“I can sell anything!”

“-- _right away_ ,” Dipper stressed, and Stan quieted down. “It might take you a longer time to do it. You don’t know _how long_ that will take yet. But you _can_ calculate out the projected profits right now.” At the frown he got from Stan, he continued. “It’s… all right, let’s assume that you can sell everything I make or fix for you, and we won’t worry about how many tries it might take to sell them just yet. We’ll just assume for now that the time it takes you to sell a certain number of something is fixed.”

“A certain number of…” Stan looked like he was starting to get a headache.

“If it’s easier to think about this while writing this stuff down, then do it,” Dipper told him, pointing at the ledger. Stan frowned at him, but he sat down on the bed and he did open up his ledger and grab a pen. “Okay. You normally sell either one or three shammies to a single person at a time, right? And you’ll probably only sell one controller at a time to one person. That’s your ‘certain number of something’, okay?” Dipper told him, and Stan was frowning at him, but he did write a few things down. “It usually takes a certain amount of time to sell something to a person, and a certain amount of time to find another customer. Let’s say it takes you five minutes to sell somebody a product -- doesn’t matter which one, we’ll assume it’s the same amount of time for now -- and ten minutes after that to find somebody else you can sell another product to.” More writing, and a lot more frowning. “That means that, best-case, you can sell to four people per hour.”

“I can sell to people faster than that,” Stan muttered, glaring up at him.

“It’s just an example,” Dipper told him. “You can change the numbers to something more realistic later.” Silence. “If your _worst_ -case on the _worst_ day for selling during the week,” Dipper revised, “Is selling to only four people per hour, and if you sell three shammies per person at five dollars for each sale, you’re selling twelve shammies for twenty dollars an hour of gross profit. And, knowing how much you’re making net profit per shammie, you know how much net profit you’re making overall, minus my five percent,” Dipper told him. “If it’s controllers you’re selling, that’s four controllers per hour.” Dipper looked Stan straight in the eye. “Are you going to make more overall net profit selling nothing but controllers, or nothing but shammies, in that hour?”

Stan frowned down at the notes he was making on his page.

“And that’s the worst-case scenario, assuming those numbers,” Dipper told him, as Stan finished off his calculations. “You can take into account shorter times -- like it taking two minutes to find another customer instead of ten -- to get the best-case numbers. Or you can include the number of times you aren’t able to sell -- like only being able to sell to three in five people -- or sell less than you expect -- like only one shammie per person instead of three -- to get the worst of the worst-case numbers, and then compare the best- and worst-case sales per hour, and per day. That tells you--”

“--how much money I’m probably gonna make every day,” Stan said, his voice sounding hollow.

“Yes,” Dipper told him. “Really, how much money you’re making as a living wage, to pay for your motel room here,” Dipper gestured at the room around them, “And also your meals and other expenses.”

Stan was staring at him. He looked a little sick almost, for some reason. (Dipper hoped it wasn’t the Italian food disagreeing with him.)

“Anyway,” Dipper said. “There are other costs to consider with the net profit that I’m not sure you’ve put in there, yet,” Dipper said, nodding at the ledger. “One is the supplies that it takes to fix these things. I’m pretty sure that the bracing material for the pitchforks is something that you can continue to get as scrap wood, effectively for free, and the twine doesn’t cost much more than that. The solder I’m using for these controllers, however,” Dipper told him, “Costs much more. And I’m going to want to be reimbursed for the materials I’m using to fix these things if I’m having to buy them myself.”

“Reimbursed?” Stan said, looking confused.

“I said I’d fix your products and invent for you,” Dipper told him, leaning back in his chair. “I didn’t say that I’d pay for the materials to fix them,” Dipper told him. --And that didn’t even get into the ‘inventing’ part yet. They hadn’t even _begun_ to discuss what his percentage might be for any new products Stan might want him to ‘invent’ for him, or who would be covering the cost of the prototype development -- raw materials, parts, tools, and whatever else that might entail.

It was one thing when Dipper was using his own money to replace what he’d had with common tools from this dimension and time period, but anything more specialized?

“If I have to pay for the solder to fix these controllers -- and I did,” Dipper told him, “-- then you’re reimbursing me for it.”

“I’m paying you five percent of the net,” Stan told him stubbornly.

“And that’s for fixing things that you then sell,” Dipper told him patiently, figuratively standing his ground. “That doesn’t include the _supplies_ that it takes to fix them. We didn’t agree to that,” Dipper told him. “And if we had, I’d end up paying more for the supplies to fix those things than I’d be getting back as my cut of the net profits. --You’re paying me back for the solder I’m using to fix these,” Dipper said firmly. “ _And_ the chemicals for making the dye fixant.” It was only a few dollars or so, but if he didn’t hold his ground on this, Stan would _not_ learn how to be properly self-sufficient in his business expenses, here.

Stan frowned at him. “You could make up anything for how much that stuff costs,” Stan told him.

“Which is why you should be the one buying the supplies, instead of me,” Dipper told him easily. “I can tell you what I think I need to fix something -- and then we can discuss whether or not that really is the best way to do those fixes given the costs involved, if you’d like, because if you’re the one buying those supplies, then you’ll know how much it all costs -- and you’ll be able to tell me whether one type of fix might be more cost-effective than another to go with, in terms of money, profitability, and time.”

Stan looked away from him. He looked uncomfortable. Dipper had a feeling that maybe what Stan was thinking at the moment was something along the lines of, ‘Is this all really worth it?’ or similar.

“Selling good products gets you repeat customers,” Dipper reminded Stan. “--It’s good business. Happy customers means more _good_ word-of-mouth advertising, and more and easier sales from the same people _and_ their friends and neighbors later.”

Stan grimaced. “Maybe,” Stan said noncommittally. He looked down and made a few marks in the ledger here and there, almost absently.

“Look,” Dipper told him. “If you can, I don’t know, sell the entire box of fixed controllers to an electronics store all-at-once, and it gets you more net profit for that day than anything else you could sell in that same period of time? Then fine. I’ll work on that instead of other things like the pitchforks.” Dipper looked at him, making eye contact with Stan as he stared up at him. “I find the work mind-numbingly awful, to be perfectly honest. But, if you can show me the numbers -- that it’s really more efficient for me to fix _these_ that to spend my time working on one of the other products instead -- that these controllers are going to make us more money, more quickly? Then I’ll do it.” Dipper gave him a half-smile. “I’d much rather work on something that’s easier and isn’t as frustrating to do -- and less work overall -- if I can, but the goal of our partnership is to make money together and to support and help each other, right? --I wouldn’t be as much help to you if I spend more of my time fixing a smaller number of things that you can’t really make all that much money off of for us,” Dipper pointed out. “That just isn’t as useful. I wouldn’t be holding up _my_ end of our partnership if I didn’t say something.”

Stan shifted in place on the bed and stopped playing with whatever he’d been doing in the ledger.

“Look, just run the numbers, please?” Dipper asked him. He was fairly certain that Stan hadn’t managed to calculate and compare it all _that_ quickly. “I’ll finish up with these things,” Dipper said, waving a hand at the half-full box, “So that it’s not a complete waste and you’ll have them to sell for tomorrow this time,” and the next day, or however long it took Stan to unload them all on a bunch of unsuspecting people. “That way, you'll be able to firm up your numbers for later, once you have a real idea of how long it'll take you to sell them," and how much Stan could get away with charging for them. "But running those numbers _now_ , even with a guess at what you think those numbers will be, will help to inform you overall on what it might be a better idea to buy and then try to sell each day, in the future, moving forward. Okay?”

Stan tilted his chin down to look straight down at his lap.

“Stan?” Dipper asked of him, craning his head downwards a bit to try and get a good look at him, because Stan’s posture was making it impossible to see the expression that was on his face just then.

Stan stayed in that low posture for a few seconds, then he straightened up all-at-once and brought his head up, with an odd sort of smile on his face and a look in his eyes that gave Dipper an uncomfortable feeling for some reason.

“Sure,” Stan told him, as he closed his ledger book without looking at it. “Sounds like a plan!”

Dipper couldn’t help but feel a little concerned.

“Look, ah, Stan--” he began.

“It’s fine,” Stan told him, looking away from him. His fingers were curled around the ledger. “You’re just trying to-- help us make money. Right?”

“Right,” Dipper confirmed. “I--”

“--You could do this without me, couldn’t you,” Stan said next, looking down at his ledger again.

Dipper let out a sigh. “Stan, I don’t _want_ to do the selling or the bookkeeping,” he reminded him. “You do all that during the day, while I’m working on my--”

“--science-y ‘project of utmost importance’, right-right,” Stan rattled off, looking up a little, then winced and looked away again as he muttered, “Forgot about that.” He rubbed at the back of his neck almost self-consciously.

“It’s fine,” Dipper told him practically. “It’s not like you’re really involved in any of that. I wouldn’t expect you to remember the details of something I’ve never actually told you about,” he said with no small amusement. Really, that would be worse than unfair. Dipper tilted his head to look at him. “And I do need you to hold up your side of things in this partnership. I _very_ much doubt that I’d be able to sell anything nearly as well as you can,” Dipper told him quite honestly. Stan had practically emptied out the room of several _boxfuls_ of merchandise over the course of two days, after all. _Two days!_ “And I certainly don’t want to try and run a business! That would be a disaster!” There was a reason he’d been perfectly happy to let Mabel be the boss when Grunkle Stan had made his money-making challenge to her and them both, while he’d tried to handle the books and help with the attractions for the Mystery Shack instead. And at this point in his life, Dipper knew full well where his strengths were, and where they weren’t.

Stan was staring at him with something of a surprised look on his face.

“But you’re good at this stuff,” Stan said, and he sounded oh so very young and lost as he said it.

“No, not really,” Dipper told him easily, with complete candor, and that seemed to break Stan’s brain a bit, from the look he got on his face.

“But you know how to do all this stuff!” Stan said urgently, gesturing at everything in the room at once, with a honestly confused openness that just made Dipper’s heart ache.

“Because my Grunkle taught me,” Dipper told him simply. “I didn’t figure all this out on my own. And even if I had…” Dipper shook his head. “Just because I know how to _do_ it, doesn’t mean I’m _good_ at it. --Look.” Dipper leveled with him. “I know how to sell to people if and when I _really_ find myself needing to, because my Grunkle taught me how to do that, just in case I ever needed it, but I’ll never be really _good_ at it. It’s a skill,” he told Stan, “But it’s also a talent.” --Doing really well at it was, anyway. “And I don’t have it.” His sister sure did, but Dipper knew full well that _he_ didn’t. Mabel and Grunkle Stan were living examples of what someone with that skill looked like, but _he_ sure wasn’t. “I’m a heck of a lot better at science and fixing things, really,” he reassured Stan.

Stan stared at him.

“What’s a grunkle,” Stan said in a weird sort of tone.

...Oh, right. Dipper felt his face heat up a bit. “Um. ‘Grunkle’ is short for ‘great-uncle’. He, uh, told us to call him that instead, because ‘time is money’ and that was quicker. Less syllables.”

Stan stared at him for awhile.

“Huh,” Stan said finally.

“Um,” Dipper felt more than a little embarrassed now at having had to explain Grunkle Stan to Stan, here. He’d started to try and think of this Stan here more like a younger cousin, to get around most of the mental awkwardness he’d been otherwise feeling, but... that probably hadn’t been a wise move, bringing up his family when Stan was having such difficulties currently with his own. “ _Any_ way…”

Stan was just sort of staring at him a bit, waiting as the silence lingered on, and Dipper realized that Stan wasn’t going to interject or change the subject on his own, like his Grunkle Stan would. This Stan here was waiting for Dipper to complete what was presumably his current thought.

Dipper cleared his throat a bit self-consciously. 

“You know,” Dipper said, trying to redirect the flow of the conversation somewhat, “With you redyeing the shammies yourself, it probably isn’t fair for me to take five percent of net profit on those,” Dipper said, and at the look on Stan’s face, he stifled a mental sigh and elaborated with, “...Because you’re doing part of the fixing for me?”

“Oh,” Stan said, blinking at him. “But…” Dipper saw Stan forcibly stop himself from talking, like he was kicking himself for even saying that much.

Well, that was as good a sign as any. So Dipper pulled in a breath, and went for broke.

Dipper scratched at the back of his head again, trying to think about how he could make what he was going to say next sound as casual and reasonable as possible. “Since you’re willing to do at least part of the fixing there yourself, instead of me having to do it, I was thinking that maybe I could teach you how to make the fixant for the cheap dye yourself,” Dipper told him, and saw Stan’s eyes widen a bit. “That way, it’s a more clear divide between what I’m providing, and what you’re doing. I don’t think that it makes sense for me to have to spend a few minutes mixing my fixant into any new dye you get before you use it, every time that you need it. And if you’re the one making the fixant solution yourself, that saves me even more time. You’ll be able to make new batches whenever you need them, and I won’t have to interrupt anything else I might be in the middle of doing to handle that for you.”

“Interrupt?” Stan echoed.

"Well, yes,” Dipper said, because they were business partners, weren't they? Was it really so foreign a thought to Stan that if he needed something urgently, Dipper would be perfectly fine with Stan simply giving him a call, and-- _Oh._ Dipper blinked. “Ah. Right. I never gave you my phone number, did I?" Dipper gestured for Stan’s pen and ledger and, after a moment, Stan handed them both over.

Dipper flipped the ledger open and quickly wrote down the phone number for his hotel room on the inside of the front cover, not bothering to look at anything else on the other pages as he told Stan, “If you need to discuss something with me during the day, or think that you’ll need me to bring the supplies for fixing something in particular, do call me and let me know? I’d rather not arrive in the evening to find that you need something, and find myself either having to leave and come back again, or wait until the next day when the stores reopen, to handle it. Horrible waste of time.” Dipper flipped the ledger closed and handed it and the pen back to Stan. “After all, it wouldn’t make any sense for you to not tell me during the day that you need me to make more fixant for you, to bring in the evening, when you need it. --Either way, I’ll need to take some time away from my own research to handle that for you. Might as well get it done sooner so that you have more shammies to sell the next day, rather than have you needing to wait a full day later than that without the supplies that you’ll need.”

Stan looked down at the ledger, flipping it open to stare at the number, then looked back up at him. “...But you wouldn’t have to do any of that if you teach me how to make that dye-fixing stuff,” Stan said slowly.

“Correct,” Dipper told him agreeably. “I could teach you how to make it yourself, and you could handle everything else with the shammies, for… hmmm, let’s say, only two-and-a-half percent of the net profit from the shammies instead?”

“One percent net,” Stan said almost as if it was by reflex, while blinking at him a little like he was shell-shocked.

“Deal,” Dipper said quickly, then had to suppress a grin as Stan blinked at him again, then gave him the same suspicious frown he’d given Dipper the first time that Dipper had agreed with him so easily.

“Half-a-percent net,” Stan not quite growled out at him, almost glowering.

“Now, now,” Dipper told him, “We already agreed! No going back on our deal.” He couldn’t hold back the grin as Stan huffed out a breath at him in annoyance, sitting back down on the edge of the bed again.

“Should’ve gone lower,” Stan muttered out to himself, and at that Dipper couldn’t help but give out a soft laugh.

“Wouldn’t have done you much good,” Dipper told him brightly, relaxing in his chair, still grinning. As Stan looked up at him, he couldn’t help but add, not quite conspiratorially, “I may not be all that good at selling, but one thing I _am_ very good at is _buying_. And I’ve had a great deal of experience at haggling over the years,” he couldn’t quite help but brag a bit. It was one of the few things that Grunkle Stan had taught him that he’d really gotten -- that had really _stuck_. Dipper was even better at it than Great-Uncle Ford! (--Which was saying a lot, considering.)

And to that… Stan actually gave him something of a considering look.

“Should I be having you buy the supplies for fixing all this junk, then?” were the next words out of Stan’s mouth, and at that… Dipper actually had to stop and think.

“Hm. Well...” Dipper said. It took him a moment to consider, but... “No, probably,” Dipper admitted. “Most places you’re likely to be buying materials from will have a fixed price; no haggling on things.” He glanced over at Stan. “Since you’re out and about during the day far more than I am, I have no doubt, you’ll be more likely to see the prices for things in more places, and know exactly where to go for the lowest prices for the items we need.” Dipper looked back to his soldering work and, as the afterthought that it was, added, “And if it’s something that you _would_ need to haggle over, it’s likely something that you would have heard about talking to other people, that I never would have known about in the first place.”

“Oh. Huh,” Dipper heard as he got back to his work.

Stan was quiet for a bit.

“...Are you sure that you’re gonna be able to teach me how to make that stuff? The dye-fixer stuff?” he heard Stan say quietly next, in a very sober tone of voice. “What if I’m too stupid to get it?”

Dipper looked over at Stan. “I very much doubt you’re ‘too stupid to get it’, Stan.” At the doubtful look on Stan’s face, Dipper sighed and added, “But if you really can’t do it? We can simply maintain the status-quo,” he told the teen. “I’ll continue making the fixant solution and mixing it into the dye for you in the proper quantities, and you’ll keep using it to redye the shammies and give me five percent of the net profit for selling them. Same as before.”

“Oh.”

Dipper shrugged at him, then got back to his soldering.

Stan seemed a bit restless, fidgeting in place for awhile. He was quiet enough that Dipper had almost tuned it out in his concentration on the blasted annoyance of a broken controller in front of him, when Stan suddenly blurted out at him, “--Are you _really_ a scientist?”

Dipper blinked, his hands freezing in their position, and he was feeling a bit sideswiped by the teen's words as he slowly turned his head towards Stan and said, “...Yes. I am.” Because really, did he not seem like a scientist? Had he done something… horribly _unscientific_ at some point in front of Stan, to have the teenager questioning him like this?

Small graces, Stan looked about as uncomfortable with the topic he’d just brought up as Dipper was feeling himself just then, but that apparently wasn’t enough to stop Stan from adding, “And you really spend the rest of the day doing _science-y_ things?”

Dipper frowned slightly, straightening in place. “Yes...” he said carefully. “Why do you ask?”

“--You have a gun!” Stan blurted out, staring at him, and Dipper just blinked, waiting for more of an explanation.

...except no further explanation was forthcoming.

“Yes, I do,” Dipper said, unsure as to what having a gun had to do with not being a scientist, apparently. He frowned at Stan slightly, as he put his soldering iron down again. “Is this some sort of a problem?”

“Scientists don’t have guns!” was what Stan blurted out next, and that just left Dipper that much more confused.

Wait… “Is there a local ordinance against scientists carrying firearms in this part of the state?” Dipper asked of the teen, his eyebrows rising in surprise, because... were there perhaps there were more differences between his home dimension and this one than he’d realized? ...Though why scientists would be singled out for persecution in such a way was unfathomable to him.

“What?” Stan looked confused for a moment. “No,” he said next, looking at Dipper oddly. “There’s a ‘law’ against _anybody_ having a gun. --The only people who have guns around here are the cops and the _criminals_ ,” Stan stressed, then paused for a moment. “Uh, and maybe some bodyguards.”

“Oh,” said Dipper. “That seems… unnecessarily restrictive,” Dipper admitted, then frowned. “Doesn’t the state give out permits for concealed carry?” Oregon certainly did; in fact, it was a shall-issue state.

“Not unless you’ve got some serious connections,” Stan told him, giving him an odd look.

“Oh. Hm.” Well, that might be problematic, if he ever ran afoul of the law here.

It was also a bit strange. Grunkle Stan had always seemed fine with guns. He’d certainly said on more than a few occasions that he had ten guns in the Shack. Hearing this worry from this Stan, and hearing about the restrictive nature of the gun regulation laws in Grunkle Stan’s home state was… certainly interesting, to say the least. Grunkle Stan seemed to support the opposite view. (...Then again, Dipper had never actually seen any of those much-talked-about ten guns, so…)

“Where the hell are you from? New Hampshire?” Stan said somewhat rhetorically.

\---

“California, actually,” was what Dipper told him so matter-of-factly that it took Stan a confused moment to try and remember if that state was one of the ones that was really gung-ho for firearms or something. --Wait, it wasn’t, was it? California was the hippies and gold state; _Texas_ was the cowboys and more-cowboys state. Right? (...Geez, where was Ford and his nerd brain for facts when you needed him. --Not that Stan needed him. He was doing just fine out in the real world here on his own!)

Stan shook his head. He was starting to feel a bit less worried, now that the gun in the middle of the room was being addressed. He’d thought that Dipper had, y’know, _meant_ something when practically the first thing he’d done after showing up that night had been to sigh over the TV remotes, take off his nerdy-yet-awesome coat, lay it over the end of the table…

...and that had been the point when Stan had left the room to go finish handling the shammies he’d been hard at work redyeing in the bathroom when he’d head Dipper knock on the door.

Stan had come back into the room once he’d finished with the shammies to be greeted with the sight of his business partner sitting bent over a table, hard at work with some kind of weird smoking pen and a strand of metallic string in his hands, his sleeves rolled up…

...and a holstered _gun_ and some kind of walkie-talkie looking thing laid out on top of his coat, right next to his supposedly just-a- _scientist_ partner. _Within arm’s reach._

And Dipper had been facing him, sitting between him and the door to the motel room.

Stan had darn near turned right around on his heel, walked himself right back into the bathroom, and tried to squeeze himself out of the tiny window in there and away to safety, _maybe_ , leaving absolutely everything behind.

Only the thought that this was supposed to be his _business partner_ had stopped him from doing that -- his business partner who kept _fixing his junk and bringing him food_. (...That, and the fact that he'd been pretty sure that if Dipper really _did_ want to shoot him and he turned his back on him again, that that might just get him shot in the _back_ instead of the _front_.)

It hadn’t helped that this had been the first time Stan had seen him without his nerdy-awesome coat on. And without his coat on, Stan had gotten a real good _look_ at him for the first time.

Stan had quickly come to the conclusion that the coat wasn’t nerdy because Dipper had been wearing it -- it was definitely nerdy all on its own. Because he'd gotten pretty good at sizing up guys at a glance from boxing in high school, and Dipper? He wasn't some muscleman, sure -- but he didn't need to be, to be downright dangerous.

Stan had run across almost every type of person imaginable over the years, growing up right next to the docks, in Glass Shard Beach. (And his ma had made it clear that the docks themselves were off-limits for a reason. Not that she'd needed to tell them twice.) They'd stuck to the beach, where the only thing you really had to worry about were the glass shards, not the people. But, even though they hadn't really been looking for trouble, that hadn't meant that trouble hadn't come to their stretch of the coastline from time to time.

Stan had seen every type and flavor of swaggering jerk imaginable on that beach, over the years. He'd also seen one or two who'd been carrying, and the less said about them the better. (He and Ford had steered well-clear of those, not least of which because if any of those types had made fun of Ford's fingers, Stan would've probably still turned right around, taken no guff from those jerks either, laid a verbal smackdown right down on them... and gotten himself shot.)

But the ones that had really sent a chill down his spine hadn't been any of those, heck no. It had been the quiet ones. The ones who were relaxed. The ones who were perfectly comfortable moving around under their own skins, and looked like they felt like they had nothing to prove.

Because they'd had nothing to prove.

He'd been scared of them at first because _Pa_ had been wary of them, had warned him off them. Pa had flat-out told him and Ford what to look for, in those types, and he'd warned them: ‘you ever come across one of those? They'll kill you, neat as you please, right where you stand, boy. You stay away from them, you hear? Don't get caught up with them, ever.’

He'd been scared of them later because of one time he'd hadn't really seen, just heard of. Just heard. He'd been walking past a couple of the local losers taunting some guy out on the side of the boardwalk, who'd just been standing there, minding his own business. And that guy had kept standing there, looking almost bored, as one of those idiots had got right up in his face.

Stan had kept on walking, minding his own. He'd been after a corndog, no reason to get involved with anything like that; why would he? He'd kept him head down, and he'd kept walking… and then he'd heard the scream. And several heavy 'thocks’, like somebody punching a sack of meat.

He'd turned around in time to see the guy casually walking away from the scene, hands swaying down at his sides as he went, blood dripping from his knuckles… but he had missed what had actually happened. So had pretty much everybody else, because the guy vanished into the crowd, neat-as-you-please, with no swaggering bravado and no trouble and nobody paying him much attention at all. And the four 'tough guys’ who had been bothering him? Had stayed right where they were in the center of a growing crowd, on the ground, bleeding.

It had only taken seconds. _Seconds_.

Ford hadn't been with him right that second, and Stan hadn't known what to do. This hadn't felt like a thing Ford could help with, and he hadn't wanted to worry his brother with something like that. So he'd told his pa about it, instead. And his pa had told him that he hadn't seen anything, and to keep his mouth shut on what he'd thought that he'd heard.

The next day at the dinner table Pa had announced that Stan and Ford were going to be taking boxing lessons, starting the next day. Stan hadn't argued. If the choice was between learning how not to be the guys bleeding on the ground and being that guy on the ground? He knew which one he didn't want to be.

Learn how to be the scary guy, yeah, sure… and then be the funny, happy guy with personality, so you didn't have to use it. Because Stan didn't _want_ to be one of those quiet scary guys with maybe no friends, having to stand up and fight against everybody, all on their own.

But maybe, just maybe, Stan had gotten one of his wires crossed somewhere.

Because Dipper, here? Was _definitely_ one of those scary guys. --He had to be. Because most guys acted differently when they had a gun on them, nervous or swaggering or secretly-smug or anything in-between. But Dipper hadn't done any of those things. Stan hadn't even realized that he'd had the gun on him, with him that night -- not until he'd seen it lying there out on top of his coat on the table.

Dipper didn't come across as scary, though. He came across as _nerdy_ most of the time. (And, really, he wasn't coming across as completely scary now either -- that was mostly the gun that was _just sitting **right there** next to him_ like it was some kind of scary 'I can mess you up anytime' sort of **statement**.) But either way, Stan now knew that there was _something_ about Dipper that he just wasn't reading right. So he had to be cautious.

He'd had problems with his last partner -- starting out all sweetness and light, and then trying to take over everything while making Stan do all the work, ordering him around like he was some kind of servant, or lackey -- but Stan had managed to handle that, to cut ties with him cleanly. So he could do that with Dipper too, if he needed to. Right? (...except, his last 'partner’ hadn't had a gun to back him up like this one did...)

\--Never let 'em see you sweat, though, right? So Stan had decided to try and play it cool as a cucumber. He had forced himself to not stop in the doorway to the bathroom, to keep on going, to walk right into that bedroom like he had every right to be there (because he did) and no reason to worry (because maybe he didn't?), and sit down on the bed and see what Dipper had wanted. To figure out what had changed. (...if anything?) ...And to maybe to make a bunch of truthful-sounding promises that he was never going to keep, just to get the guy to leave him alone by himself for long enough that he could grab all of his junk and jump in his car and get the hell out of dodge.

The problem was, Dipper had just spent half the time tonight either acting all confused like everything Stan said wasn't making any sense, or acting like everything was totally normal and there were no guns around at all, no guns in the room with them, and what the hell was his _deal?_

“Doesn't California not like guns, too?” Stan asked him.

“Well…” Dipper started, then trailed off. “Yes. But…”

Stan frowned at Dipper's frown, because it looked like he was debating whether to tell him something or not.

Stan began to wonder if his (seriously, coming across as _really_ clueless right now!) partner was _ever_ gonna fess up to whatever his _real_ deal was, anytime soon. So Stan tried again to get him to just give it up already by saying, “What kind of scientist needs a gun, anyway?”

“One that travels quite a bit,” Dipper told him, and _that_ had Stan straightening in place where he sat, because _what?_

“You _travel!?_ \--Wait,” Stan said, getting ahold of himself, because _gun_ and _let's not get sidetracked here, Pines_ , because that _still_ didn't make sense. “Why would you need a gun to _travel?_ ” Stan demanded, and he was pretty sure that he'd caught Dipper out this time.

Except all that Dipper did was blink at him and say, like it was as obvious as water being wet, “For self-defense.”

That, more than anything else, sent a chill running down Stan’s spine.

“Traveling is that dangerous?” Stan said, and he felt kind of stupid as the words came out of his mouth.

...not because he thought traveling was necessarily that dangerous, he didn’t believe _that_ one for a second, not really. But it _had_ suddenly occurred to Stan that _adventuring_ was supposed to be a lot more dangerous than just ‘traveling’, and he’d wanted to drag Ford off into the middle of _that_ , out on the high seas with him. Stan hadn’t thought about maybe needing _weapons_ for anything while they were doing that. ...But the closest they’d ever had to a _real_ adventure on dry land had been what had happened with the Jersey Devil, and… hell, what if there hadn’t been any nets around when it had been running after them, chasing them down and trying to kill them? What if Stan had had a gun on him when that had happened? Would he have been able to shoot that thing to save them? --Would his brother have _let_ him shoot it?

Dipper was super-smart, like Ford. Had _Ford_ known that international treasure-hunting might be that dangerous? Or even traveling maybe? --Was that part of the reason why he’d been thinking about going to that dumb stuffy old college in the first place, instead of going adventuring with Stan? Was that why he’d thought their dream of sailing off on the Stan O’ War was a backup plan at _best?_ \--And if he did, then _why hadn’t he **said** anything?!?_ Ford was the smart one; he was supposed to know this stuff, not Stan! And he should’ve known that Stan wouldn’t have wanted to drag his own brother off to someplace that dangerous and get them both _killed!_ If Ford had just _said something--_

“Oh. Well,” Stan heard Dipper say, and he saw his business partner lean back in his chair, blinking rapidly for some reason. “I mean, it… can be dangerous? Depending on where you go,” Dipper said, without really explaining anything at all. And he seemed to realize this, because he tried to follow it up with “...I’ve, ah, well, some of the places where I’ve traveled to-- ah, that is…”

Stan stared at his business partner as Dipper seemed to mentally backtrack and stop short again and again, and if this was how he normally talked when he wasn’t ready to say anything yet, Stan was pretty sure he was okay with the minutes-long silences instead. (Stan felt kind of embarrassed just watching him flail around with words like that, to be honest. Just a little bit.)

He saw Dipper take in a deep breath, lower his chin slightly, and pinch the bridge of his nose. “Right. Okay.” Dipper dropped his hand and looked back up at him. “Most places in the US aren’t that dangerous, and if you know what you’re doing and can recognize the differences between safe and unsafe areas, you’ll be just fine. Other countries are more problematic. I’ve been… a bit farther afield myself,” Dipper said ambiguously, and Stan almost had to bite his lip bloody to stop himself from asking _where, exactly? when? how? what was it like?_ “It really depends on where you’re going, who you’re with, and what you’re doing, in terms of how much danger you can expect to find yourself in.”

Stan couldn’t help but frown at him a little. He kind of guessed that Dipper being here in Jersey on his own was maybe not that big a deal to him, but… the way his business partner was talking right now, it sounded like he usually traveled _with_ someone, not alone.

So where was Dipper’s old partner right now?

“As for self-defense in general, I do know how to defend myself hand-to-hand without a gun,” Dipper continued on blasely, and that was no surprise there to Stan, with _his_ build, “But most places I’ve traveled to… well, some don’t require a gun for self-defense, but some do, and in many places it’s practically _expected_ that you have one on you, and if you don’t… well, then you’re just _asking_ for trouble,” Dipper told him matter-of-factly, like a _gun_ was some kind of go-to accessory like wearing a yarmulke to Saturday services. “Which I suppose is the opposite of what you’re used to here?” Dipper said with a slight frown and an odd smile as he looked at him.

“Uh, _yeah_ ,” Stan said, feeling more than a little uncomfortable at some of the things Dipper had just tossed at him from out of nowhere. “Um. Are you a criminal?” Stan asked next, trying not to feel too nervous about it. Because he wasn’t. It was fine! He just… needed to know -- for business purposes, obviously, like maybe how little Dipper might need to stay the hell off of the streets during daylight -- and the way Dipper winced slightly when Stan asked him about that didn’t look like a good sign. Oh, man.

“Well,” Dipper began, looking down at his gun. “I mean, if I’m supposed to have a permit just to have a gun, then technically…” he trailed off.

“--I mean besides that,” Stan said. “Don’t go trying to do that, either, getting a permit,” Stan warned him, because it wasn’t like there was anything either of them could do about that now, just hope that nobody caught his partner with _that thing_ on him. (And Stan would deny to his dying breath that he knew he’d had it.)

“Why not?” Dipper asked him, looking _relaxed_ of all things for some reason.

“Because if you try to bring it in and get it registered _now_ , you won’t be able to,” Stan told him, feeling a little frustrated. “You’ll just get yourself arrested for having it, no permit, ‘cause you didn’t buy it here. Right?” There was no way anyone would have let him walk out of a gunshop with a gun without going through the whole rigamarole, and Stan got the feeling from staring at it that this was no back alley twenty-bucks-a-pop Saturday Night Special sitting on top of that coat. “Besides, even if you pull some weird science-y nerdy stuff and somehow talk somebody into giving you a carry permit somehow, that’d just put you on the mob’s radar,” Stan told him, and oh did he not want to lose his partner to those guys! Stay away from the docks, stay away from those people. Stan _knew_ better.

“Ah,” Dipper said, sounding enlightened in some deep way that Stan didn’t really get. “Yes. Let’s steer clear of them, shall we?” Dipper said lightly.

“It isn’t a joke,” Stan said, starting to feel angry, but maybe also a little frightened. (...That was a lie, he was scared shitless right now.)

“Stan, look at me,” Dipper said, and Stan was looking, all right. “The War on Drugs started recently, didn’t it?” Stan nodded. “And a great many drugs are illegal now, which means that there is a new black market for them. So the mob is looking for chemists--”

“--Don’t do it!” Stan told him, jumping to his feet. “I won’t--!!”

“-- _and I **don’t** want to work for them,_” Dipper ground out with steel in his voice and flashing eyes, and Stan stopped short and slammed his mouth shut, staring at hi,. “Sit down, Stanley.” Stanley sat. “I don’t want to work for them, and I don’t want _you_ working for them, _either_ ,” Dipper told him, which just left Stan all kinds of confused. “Stan, teaching you how to make the fixant for that cheap dye of yours _is_ chemistry, and they are _looking for chemists_ to make _drugs_ for them.” Oh. “If I teach you how to do this, I want you to promise _not_ to work for them, _ever_.”

“Oh,” Stan said, blinking at him, because _oh_. That… could make him a _lot_ of money, but... _oh._

“ _Stan_ ,” Dipper said, and-- oh.

“--I won’t work for them ever,” Stan repeated quickly.

“Good.” Wait, that was it? ...Okay, maybe not, because Dipper was still looking at him carefully. “I take a _very_ hard line when it comes to highly addictive substances that are generally not safe to use and also deadly,” Dipper told him, and… wait. There was a difference between those two? “They generally get used in the slave trade quite a bit.” What? “And… you asked me if I’m a criminal. Well, in some places, I _am_ considered one,” oh shit, “Because in those places slavery is considered legal, and I have broken up several slave-trade rings in those places.” Wait, _what??_ “--Not on my own, of course; it was a team effort.” _**What???**_ “Drugs tend to go hand-in-hand with that sort of thing; some of the nastiest ones you’ll ever see, in fact -- extreme addictions used to enslave someone, with a single dose that leave a person _mindless_ with cravings and worse.” Holy shit. “I’m not talking about the sort of thing that’s safe for recreational use or medicinal purposes here, I’m talking about the shit that will _really_ fuck you up,” Dipper told him, and the swearing let him know that his partner was dead-serious, because he seemed like the kind of guy who _didn’t_ swear, usually. “And so, as a matter of principle, I’d _highly_ recommend that you not only just not work for the mob, making drugs, but also steer well-clear of any sort of work with them _entirely._ Understand?”

“Yessir,” Stan said without question, because it was pretty clear that ‘ _highly_ recommend’ meant ‘ _if I ever hear otherwise, I will come back and either put you in a bodybag, or make you wish I had_ ’.

Dipper sighed.

“This was really _not_ what I was planning on talking with you about tonight,” Dipper said, sounding tired, as he pinched the bridge of his nose again and leaned back in his chair.

“You’re the one who brought the gun!” Stan pointed out doggedly, because it wasn’t like it was _his_ fault.

Dipper dropped his hand and looked up at him. “Stan, I’ve been wearing it here every night. This is simply the first time I’ve taken it off while being here.”

Well, shit.

“Is it really that big of a deal that I have it?” Dipper asked him.

“ _Yes!_ ” Stan said.

“Oh.” Dipper blinked. “I…” He blinked again, twice. “Is it making you feel uncomfortable?”

Stan stared at him.

“I, ah.” Dipper frowned slightly. “Well, I suppose I could put it back on?” Like that would help! Then Dipper grimaced. “But the reason I took it off in the first place was because of the risk of static shock to the components,” and he gestured at the half-taken-apart controller in front of him.

“You couldn’t just not bring it with you?” Stan mumbled, and tried not to wince as Dipper gave him an aghast look.

“And leave it behind in my hotel room? Certainly not!” Dipper said, and the guy sounded almost offended at Stan asking this _why?_ “There are maids that go in there to clean periodically, and the hotel staff in general have keys to access the room. Anyone could get at it there; that would be irresponsible!” Uh… “And with the mob here and active… well, I’d rather have it on me than not, in a town whose streets I’m still unfamiliar with,” Dipper ended, and Stan totally saw where _that_ one was going. Shit.

“You planning on shooting somebody with that thing,” Stan said, trying to sound uncaring about it. He was pretty sure he hadn’t pulled it off, though, not with the look Dipper was giving him after he closed his fool mouth.

“Stan, let me be clear,” Dipper said, sounding serious. “I don’t draw my gun very often. And when I do -- the _only_ time that I ever do, in fact -- is when I believe that I am in danger of losing my life if I _don’t_ pull it out, ready to shoot someone, that very instant. That if I _don’t_ do it, that I or someone else will die very quickly, and I believe that there is no other option left available to me in order to stop that from happening,” Dipper told him plainly. “That is the _only_ time you will _ever_ see me pull my gun from its holster -- and _if_ you see me do that, you should _run_ ,” Dipper told him, “Because I _don’t_ want to see you getting hurt.” Yeah, well, that made sense; Stan wouldn’t want to see someone else getting shot, either. “Frankly, my natural reaction to being shot at is to get out of the way of the bullets, not to try and get between them and someone else. I might not be able to cover you properly.” Wait, wh--?? _Oh._

“Oh,” said Stan, and that was one _hell_ of a thing to drop on a guy. Dipper hadn’t been threatening him with the thing. Shooting Stan wasn’t even on his freaking radar, maybe-jumping-in-front-of-a- _bullet_ -for-him was. Shit.

“Yes, ‘oh’,” Dipper repeated. “I don’t take this sort of thing lightly.” Then Dipper smiled at him. “We are partners, aren’t we?”

Wait, what? _Seriously?_ What did this guy think partners were _like?_ Talking about taking bullets for people...

Wait. Partners like… maybe whoever he’d handled taking on that slave-ring with?

\--Oh, oh _shit_. Did he just say--? _Shit._

“--You think those slave-ring guys are gonna come after you _here?_ ” Stan said, and he couldn’t help it that his voice went a little panicky at the end there. --But that was normal, right? _Anybody_ would freak out at the idea of their business partner’s enemies coming after them and _him_ , too! And a shootout with bad guys here, in Jersey…? -- _That_ wasn’t an adventure, that was _murder_ , and-- and they weren’t _that_ far away from his home, either, just an hour’s drive away, what if they--

“What?” Dipper said, sounding startled. “--No!” Dipper said quickly, holding up his hands. “No, no Stan. They aren’t going to-- that’s _not_ a concern,” Dipper told him staunchly, and Stan’s heart started beating again. “Really. They have no idea where I am, and they haven't the means to follow me here even if they did. And most of them are dead, and the rest have _far_ greater concerns right now than--” Dipper paused at the look that must have been on Stan’s face at the _most of them are dead_ , and... “Ah, I’m not really being all that reassuring right now, am I.” Stan shook his head. “Apologies.”

Stan let out a short laugh. He couldn’t help it, because… _shit_ , this guy was really _something_ , wasn’t he? Holy shit. Freaking breaking up slave rings? Shooting bad guys? Freeing people? And who knew what else? This guy sounded like some kind of freedom-fighter _hero_ , which was more than Stan had ever even _dreamed_ of being. ~~(And maybe a lot scarier than he’d ever imagined, too.)~~

(...Hell. This guy hadn't been making a statement with taking off or showing off his gun. It hadn't been some show of force, wanting to scare him, or take over the business operation they now had going on here. Dipper really had just taken it off because of that static electricity thing he'd been worried about, hadn't he. This nerdy scientist-guy hadn't really thought anything at all about doing it; he really hadn't meant anything by it.)

And Stan didn’t doubt any of what Dipper had told him for an instant. Not one single word. _Nobody_ acted like Dipper did, talked like that, without being able to back that shit up. And... maybe Stan was being stupid for believing him, swallowing all this craziness without really questioning it, but c’mon! The guy did _everything_ with _nothing_ \-- Stan had _seen_ him fix things like magic for going on four nights now, with just a bag of tools and a couple of scraps of nothing-special -- and wasn’t _that_ the kind of thing you’d _expect_ out of some science-y geek who was fighting the system and helping the little guy out?

\--Sure, _maybe_ the guy was just nuts, some kind of insane person or something, where he didn’t realize he was making all this stuff up and was lying? But Stan really doubted it. You didn’t talk about being responsible with guns, or staying away from mobsters and drugs like somebody’s life depended on it, if you were on a fast-track to the loony bin.

...So why was Dipper _here_ then, wasting his time with fixing all of Stan’s broken shit, when he could be out _there_ , wherever, helping a whole bunch of other people who it sounded like were in way more trouble and needed _way_ more help than Stan ever did?

What _was_ this ‘science-y stuff’ that Dipper was working on here during the day, that had to be more important than _that_?

“Look, I-- I suppose I’m rather used to wearing it at this point,” Dipper confessed. At least, it sure sounded like a confession, the way he was talking about his gun. “This is… honestly the first time I’ve taken it off since arriving in the state.” And that was freaking unbelievable.

“What,” Stan said, “You _sleep_ with it on?”

“Yes,” Dipper said, and he frowned slightly as Stan stared -- like the guy couldn’t understand _why_ Stan was staring at him like he was. “It’s holstered; it’s not unsafe. I have it right at-hand if I need it, and it’s not uncomfortable to wear. ...Ah, for me, I mean, I suppose,” he ended.

“Geez,” Stan said, shifting in place.

“It’s just another tool,” Dipper told him.

“Yeah, a tool that can _kill_ people,” Stan muttered. But Stan realized suddenly that if that was how Dipper thought of guns, though, then maybe it almost made sense that--

“So could just about anything, if you know how to misuse it.” Wow, way to make a guy feel safe there, pal. “I’m not asking _you_ to wear one.” Like that made it any better! But then Dipper looked at him sort of sideways. “I… suppose I’m just asking you to trust me to only use it when…” Dipper paused as Stan shifted in place. “ _Ah_ ,” his business partner said, sounding tired. “I see.” He let out a sigh. “I suppose I’m asking you to trust me when I say that I’m not going to ever use it against _you_ , no matter what happens,” Dipper said, and great going you dumb idiot, now he’s thinking the thing you never wanted him to think!

Stan didn’t want to look up at him, to try and figure out what he was gonna have to do next, with a guy in the same room at him who was thinking about shooting him now, but now he kind of had to. And he was kind of expecting _something_ bad, but not what he saw. Because when Stan looked up at him, the guy sort-of looked kind of… old, almost, and way more tired than he’d sounded before (and that was saying something), and… it almost made Stan feel like kind of a heel. Like a ‘why don’t you trust me? I never did anything to you’ kind of a heel.

Except Dipper kind of _had_ done things to him, or, well, _for_ him, he’d done a _lot_ of things, they just weren’t… _bad_ things. And...

It made Stan feel really, _really_ uncomfortable.

“That’s a lot of trust to be giving a guy I just met five days ago,” Stan said, and... holy shit, it really only had been five days, hadn’t it?

“I… suppose it is,” Dipper said like he was doing his thinking thing, and shit, this was it, his business partner was gonna walk away from everything over this -- and, okay, _maybe_ not shoot him as he left -- because Stan just didn’t _trust_ him and-- oh shit, that was what this _was_ , wasn’t it? A trust thing? Because business partners were supposed to be able to _trust_ each other and-- maybe this was some kind of a _test_ instead of some kind of a statement and-- what was _wrong_ with him, he- _they_ had a _good_ thing going here and it was… it was just a _gun_ , right? Why couldn’t he just laugh it off and--

“Would it help if I disabled the gun so that it can’t fire fatal shots?” Dipper asked him next.

Stan stared at him, then let out another disbelieving laugh. He couldn’t help it that time, either. “Right. ‘Cause, what, taking the bullets out is still gonna make it useful?” The guy _clearly_ wasn’t gonna do that. --So, what, was he gonna just promise to only shoot him in the _arm_ if he got pissed off, not the head?!

Dipper stared at him for a moment, and then he got a grin like _he_ was about to burst out laughing. “Stanley,” he said, relaxing completely into his chair, what the actual _fuck_ , “This gun doesn’t shoot bullets, it shoots _electricity_.” What?? “I wouldn’t be worried about electrostatic shock while soldering these electronic components if I was wearing a piece of _conventional_ weaponry that fired lead bullets.” Well, how was _he_ supposed to know that! He was the _sales_ guy, not the geeky know-it-all _scientist!_

Stan glared at his business partner and crossed his arms.

“I-- I’m sorry, I just-- assumed--” Dipper shook his head, winced, though he was still kinda smiling, then scratched at the side of his head. “If I disable the kill settings completely -- not just password-lock them, since I know the password and could reset it at need, but actually physically _disable_ them to keep them from working -- and leave it unable to shoot anything but stun-level blasts at most, will _that_ make you feel better? Safe enough for me to be carrying it with me around you?”

Shit, was this guy serious? “Is this one of those science-y things that you do? Make electric guns that can kill people?” Stan asked of him skeptically, but now also feeling super-uncomfortable in a totally different way -- because what if his business partner was one of those mad scientist types who’d put sci-fi killer lasers on his vacuum cleaner or something, just because? (That wouldn’t fly with the housewives, Stan was pretty sure. ...Okay, maybe it would if they didn’t like their husbands, but not if they had kids in the house!)

(Then Stan had a vision of himself, in a TV commercial for the Stan Vac, tellin’ folks about how the Stan Vac sucks -- and that it has _no_ killer lasers on it, no killer lasers _at all_ , not even _one_ \-- and then? ...There wouldn’t be any lasers on it, because he’d damn well make sure that there weren’t any! But. There’d be that _one_ smart-ass... or maybe two, two smart-asses -- _two_ smart-asses who would call him up and be all like, _hey, where’s my killer laser on my vacuum, didn’t you say there was supposed to be at least one?_ And then Stan would--)

(...need a phone line to take orders, because who did mail-orders anymore? Let alone sent them to a motel room. --Hell. He hadn’t thought of that before. Why did selling things have to be so complicated, and cost so much money! Couldn’t he just keep walking up to people on the street and selling things _that_ way?! ...Except if he wanted to even _try_ and make a million dollars--)

“Well, no,” Dipper said. “Not exactly. That is, I did make this gun myself, yes, but I generally don’t go around making weapons for other people,” Dipper said, like he was trying to sound reassuring.

“Okay,” Stan said, shaking himself and getting his head back in the game, because holy shit. “Okay. That’s _definitely_ also a thing you should _also_ **not** be telling the mob. Or anyone else. **Ever.** ” Because then those ‘anyone else’s would tell the mob; the mob paid for info like that, and they liked getting their hands on new guns and stuff. And sure, electric guns sounded like something out of one of those geeky sci-fi shows -- heck, Wagon Train To The Stars had some kind of ‘energy pulse’ rifles, or something, didn’t they? -- but this thing actually sounded _real_ , and was sitting there right in front of him on that table in that holster _looking_ like a real actual gun, and what if it actually _worked?_

“Well, of course I won’t tell anyone else,” Dipper said like it was common sense, and hey, at least one of these things that they’d been talking about tonight was common sense to him! Stan was starting to think that maybe his business partner just didn’t have any! ...Not on anything other than the how-to-run-a-business stuff, anyway -- but how much of that stuff was actually _him_ and not just whoever had _taught_ him that stuff?

Stan took in a deep breath, and tried to calm the hell down and really think through everything his business partner had just told him, the different-gun-settings stuff and everything else.

“You… you’d really do that,” Stan said, finally. “Make it so you can’t use it to kill people.” Dipper nodded at him, and hey, that was totally fine, right? Really, really... “Great.” --Except there was, y’know, just one small problem right there with this whole thing! “How’m I gonna know you did that to that thing.”

Dipper tensed in place for a moment. “Well.” Then he frowned. “That’s a good point. Explaining what I did to it to disable those settings wouldn’t be enough, would it? Because I could be lying to you, and you might not know it.” And then he did his couple-minutes-of-thinking thing without talking.

And then Dipper looked up at Stan and said, “I suppose I could let you shoot me with it at each of the highest settings on down, to confirm its functioning and disfunction. --After I finish disabling it, of course.”

“-- _Hell_ no,” Stan objected, strongly. “I’m not _shooting_ you! _Are you **nuts?!**_ ”

“It’s really the only way that I can think of to prove to you that it does what I say it will do -- by actually showing you,” Dipper said, shrugging at him. “Firing it at a thing instead of a person wouldn’t tell you whether or not any particular shot might be fatal to someone. And--”

“ _I’m not shooting you_ ,” Stan told him breathlessly. “That’s _insane._ \--I could _kill_ you!” Stan pointed out almost desperately. “What if you-- screwed it up, and the stupid thing was still shooting fatal-things out of it and I hit you with it?! --I ain’t risking my partner’s life like that,” Stan told him, and that was final!

“Stanley, I know what I’m doing. I made the blasted thing. I check it daily, and perform routine maintenance on it every three days.” Right, because firing something at his partner that routinely broke down every three days sounded like a really great idea. “And it wouldn’t be any greater risk than I take having to depend on it when my life is at stake because _other_ people are shooting at me, and I need it to work properly then, too,” Stan was told.

“I ain’t shooting you,” Stan repeated.

“Stanley--”

“How is me shooting you any better than you shooting me?!” Stan challenged him.

“Because--” Dipper stopped, then sighed like he was being put-upon for _not being shot at_ or something -- like _Stan_ was being the unreasonable one here -- and it was making Stan feel really nervous. But then he said, “Alright, fine. But I don’t see how else I can convince you--”

“It’s fine,” Stan told him. “Just-- make the thing not able to kill people, and it’s fine. I’m fine.” Heck, he probably shouldn’t be getting all whiney about it, anyway. Most guys from school wouldn’t be all worried about it, they'd be all impressed that they were partners with a big shot with a gun ~~(except those guys were idiots)~~ and all ‘holy shit’ about it in a good way, right? And Stan was supposed to be some cool 25-year-old adult, as far as this guy knew ~~(except he was pretty sure Dipper did know)~~ , and guns were an adult thing, right? So he should probably just get over this. (He’d probably run into the mob sooner or later if he stayed in town, everybody did, so he should probably get used to not losing his shit if he had to stay in the same room as a guy with a gun _now_ , before it got to be maybe a problem _later_ …) Wasn’t like his business partner was going to shoot him with it, right? Not if he was talking about letting _Stan_ shoot him with it instead, just because he thought it might, what, make Stan _feel better_ about him having it? (And how did that even make sense?)

“Stanley--”

“It’s fine,” Stan said. “Didn’t I just say it was fine?”

Dipper rubbed at the back of his neck and looked uncomfortable himself.

Then he stood up.

“Uh…” Stan said, standing up real quick as he saw Dipper reach for the gun. “What…”

Dipper stopped moving, hand outreached, watching Stan. “Stan, I will need to remove the gun from its holster to take off the outer casing, to access the interior, and change a few of its settings. Are you alright with that?” Stan nodded jerkily, and he watched as Dipper did that. It didn’t get past him that Dipper kept the thing pointed away from him at all times while he was doing that.

Pretty quickly, Dipper was putting the outside stuff back on it, and Stan couldn’t help but say, “That’s it?” Because that seemed waaaay too easy, whatever he did there.

“Well, not exactly,” Dipper told him, as he finished up, then slid the gun back into its holster. “I’ve disabled it completely for now by disconnecting the firing mechanism from the gun’s power source.”

Woah, what? “I thought you said that you didn’t want to go around unarmed!” Stan said.

“Yes, well, I doubt anyone will be ambushing us in your motel room this evening, and I can re-enable it again just as easily before I leave for the night,” Dipper told him, as he picked up the holster and slid it across the back of the waistband of his jeans, where it seemed to stop in place on its own right at the small of his back. “You don’t seem to like the sight of it much, so…” Dipper lifted, then resituated the sweater-vest he was wearing to cover over it so Stan couldn’t see anything more than a lump. “I thought disabling it completely would work out best for now. It effectively completely turns the unit off and grounds the exterior; no risk of sparks or small shocks because it doesn’t need to stay equalised with the environment around it to work. This way I can wear it, to keep it out of sight, while I finish up this soldering work,” Dipper told him, as he sat himself back down.

“...And?” Stan prompted him, slowly sitting down again himself.

Dipper grimaced slightly as he grabbed his soldering pen thing. “And I’d rather wait until I’m back in my own hotel room to disable single-settings on this gun rather than the entire thing, where I can focus on the work without interruption or distraction, because-- ...All right, fine, yes, you’ve made your point,” Dipper ended not-quite-sourly and a bit of a nerd-getting-called-out-on-unsafe-science-things sigh, as Stan gave him a look that meant, ‘yeah, you were saying _what_ about _what_ being how risky?’

Dipper picked up right where he’d left off with the TV remotes, as far as Stan could tell -- like they hadn’t been talking about anything important a couple seconds ago -- while Stan picked up his ledger and got back to his figuring himself, and tried to stop thinking about the gun Dipper had on him.

...It was actually way easier than he’d thought, with the stupid scary thing being out of sight finally (his partner had been right about that), and with all the other stuff that they’d talked about earlier, for him to have to go through, distracting him from thinking about it.

He started with the best-case and worst-case stuff, which he’d already run a couple numbers on while Dipper had been talking to him about that best-case worst-case stuff earlier. It was definitely something that Stan almost wanted to avoid going through -- but avoiding bad things hadn’t gotten him into anything but trouble lately, so he tried not to do that anymore. And those numbers he’d run before? Had been his hard targets for how much he needed to sell each week to not get kicked out of his motel room, and to be able to afford three meals a day without Dipper paying for every third meal.

So, now he knew how much he had to sell or he’d end up out on the streets starving -- or, well, out in his _car_ starving and with maybe not enough gas to get himself anywhere better. It was a little scary to see it all written down in black and white, how many people he needed to sell to each day before he could maybe relax a bit, and how much stuff. It was a _lot._

What was even worse than that? Was what he'd have left beyond what Dipper had called a ‘living wage’ -- after the motel expenses and the food costs (though Stan had no idea what _other expenses_ Dipper might mean, except maybe gas for his car to move stuff around) -- and Dipper’s own five percent net. That ‘leftover’ money was what he’d be able to save towards the million dollars he needed to earn to buy his way back into his family. (Because he was pretty sure, after thinking about it, that his pa hadn’t been talking about _gross_ profits when he’d said Stan needed to make them a fortune, he was talking about the _net_. Something Stan could hand over and say: ‘here, this is mine. I made this. I don’t have to use this for anything else.’)

He’d run the numbers quickly and easily -- it hadn’t been hard. This much net profit per day times 365 days times 20, 30, 40, 50, 70 years? 100? _500?_ \--It hadn’t really mattered once he’d got higher than fifty. At the rate he was going, he was never going to make a million dollars in net profit before he died.

He’d stared down at the page after he’d figured that one out earlier than evening, and he’d sort of heard his business partner talking without hearing him for a minute. He’d kind of stared at Dipper for awhile, afterwards.

...And then Dipper had hit him with thinking about the cost of the stuff he needed to use for the repairs -- which, he was right, Stan _hadn’t_ figured into the net profit yet, of course he hadn’t, _Dipper_ had been the one paying for that stuff -- and it had felt like a punch in the gut, that whole reimbursement paying-him-back-for-the-supplies thing. It was a thing he hadn’t felt too comfortable trying to argue about much with that gun sitting right out there earlier, and the fact that, yeah, his partner’s five percent net _wouldn’t_ cover that for most of that stuff didn’t help. And Dipper was paying for dinner for them both already -- what would happen if he stopped doing that before Stan got his shit together, Stan didn’t want to think about...

Having to think about the money it’d take to buy the supplies to fix all of this junk had hurt. And that had just shrunk that ‘leftover’ money he’d just calculated out down that much lower, even worse than before. And then, when Stan had remembered that TV commercial he’d been thinking about trying to save money towards, and then had thought of how maybe he’d need a backup fund or something, for days when maybe he wouldn’t able to sell that much (because that _did_ happen sometimes)... that shrunk those ‘leftovers’ down to nearly nothing.

He was never going to make millions. He’d finally realized that. He was never going to get his family back.

He wasn’t sure how he hadn’t just broken down crying on the spot. Because yeah, Pines men were tough, Pines men didn’t cry, but _he wasn’t a Pines anymore_ and it _**hurt**_ that he was never going to see his family again.

He hadn’t cried. He’d just smiled and gotten on with things instead.

\--Like wanting to know _why him_. Because if his own family didn’t want him, then why did _this_ guy who had a gun right out on the table there keep acting like maybe he _did_ need Stan, when he absolutely _didn’t?_ Answer: there was no way in hell he did, because he already knew all this stuff!

Except when Stan had confronted him on it, like an idiot… Dipper hadn’t made him feel like an idiot. He’d made Stan feel like the _opposite_ of an idiot. He’d told Stan that he wasn’t some genius who just knew this stuff, that he’d had somebody _teach_ him all this stuff -- and it didn’t get past him that Dipper was probably, _maybe_ explaining this stuff to _him_ the same way Dipper had had it explained to him by this ‘grunkle’ of his.

Not that Stan would complain about getting any of that info secondhand -- or _anything_ secondhand really, it wasn’t like he wasn’t used to sharing things and all sorts of hand-me-downs growing up -- but… it kind of made him wonder what it’d be like to be getting it direct-from-source, from the kind of guy who straight-up _lived_ the idea of ‘time is money’ so hard, he thought using two syllables instead of three for a word was better!

Seriously, Stan was actually kind of jealous of his business partner, and maybe also a little confused. Because, let’s be honest here, if the guy thought he couldn’t _sell_ stuff real well, but could _buy_ it like nothing-going? That was… just a state of mind or something, right? Dipper hadn’t been ‘selling himself’, he’d been ‘buying Stan’, sure -- but those two things weren’t actually that different. It was just… looking at things the other way around. Right? So… shouldn’t a ‘grunkle’ who knew time was money and had taught Dipper all this stuff have been able to figure that one out and tell _him_ that?

Stan frowned down at his ledger as he puzzled over that one, and then something else occurred to him. _Maybe it went both ways._ Maybe showing Dipper that ‘buying this’ and ‘selling that’ could be the same thing would make him better at selling... but maybe it could also go the other way, instead. Could making ‘buying’ and ‘selling’ seem like the same thing make Dipper _worse_ at ‘buying’?

Maybe it was a confidence thing. Dipper had seemed totally confident about buying things by bartering, and completely _not_ on anything else. And confidence went a long way when you were making deals, and making sales.

...So, it was probably a confidence thing. Stan had figured that one out pretty quick on his own, selling things out on the street. ...And he was going to have to be careful all over again, now that he knew _exactly_ how much he needed to sell per day, and maybe how many people he needed to sell to. Because now that he knew for sure… he could start out the day feeling _really_ desperate if he wasn't careful, knowing those numbers that he’d have to hit -- and people avoided ‘desperate’ like the plague. He’d have to put on his game face and…

Wait. How many things _did_ he usually sell each day? Because it _wasn’t_ always the same, not like Dipper talked about it, like everything was consistent. How much stuff did he actually sell _each day_ : Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday? He knew that, right? Because some days of the week were better than others for some stuff, and usually he made up for a lot of the weekdays on the weekends. And… heck, maybe Dipper _did_ know that one, too. Because he'd said that thing about _worst-case on the worst day_ …

Stan had never really _planned_ for it before, but if he started writing that down, to track it… he could know how much he was probably going to make in a heck of a lot more detail than Dipper had talked about it, and plan better on what and how much stuff to bring with him each day, too.

...Maybe he could even tell when it was time to switch over to new merchandise? He’d had to swap over to other things before -- not just because he’d run out, but because they’d stopped selling, because people had stopped buying them. He’d thought that had been happening because some of those things had been such utter crap and word had started getting around, but what if that hadn't been it? Could that happen with good products, too…?

“Dipper,” Stan asked. “Does decent not-junk stuff stop selling sometimes if you’ve sold too much of it?”

“You mean market saturation?” Dipper said, and of course there was a word for this thing. Great... “Well, it depends on what you’re selling. Consumables aren’t usually seasonal, but things like pitchforks…” Dipper leaned back in his chair and put the soldering pen thing down -- which meant this was important, the guy only put his tools and stuff down if he was really paying attention to Stan and thinking hard -- Dipper didn’t split his focus when he was doing stuff he needed to think about usually. “That is, consumables like food, water, toilet paper, paper towels -- things like that -- get used up by people, and then they need more pretty quickly, right? So you can sell more of the same thing to the exact same person again and again. Non-consumables are trickier, though. For instance, usually a person only needs one pitchfork for themselves, two if they have a significant other that they’re doing yardwork with--”

“Unless they fall apart,” Stan pointed out, just because.

“Except then they wouldn’t want to buy another one of those from _you_ when the first one from you didn’t hold up,” Dipper pointed out himself, and Stan waved it off; they’d both made their own points. “Anyway, for most households, two would be the limit.”

“Eh, sell ‘em a third if they’ve got a kid,” Stan said offhand.

“Stanley, I think selling someone with a baby a pitchfork for that child when they can’t even walk yet might be a bit of a stretch,” Dipper said, giving him an odd look.

Stan gave him an odd look right back. “I was talkin’ about teenagers.”

“Oh. Right.” Dipper blinked, then frowned. “Well, only if you make them small enough to use them. Most teenagers can’t use full-sized tools right away; it depends on their age.” And before Stan could fully process _that_ one, Dipper went on to say, “We’re getting a bit sidetracked, here. The point is, some things don’t sell very well during different times of the year -- like yard tools when it’s too cold out to work on a garden -- and don’t need to be replaced very often, so once you’ve sold enough of them when they _are_ selling--”

“Wait, hold up,” Stan said. “I think I kind of liked that sidetrack. Let’s go back to that,” he told Dipper, which left his business partner looking confused, but Stan thought that maybe they were on to something there. It had felt like they might be. “Smaller pitchforks? For kids?”

“Well,” Dipper seemed to struggle with the thought for a moment. “It depends on the age.”

“Keep goin’,” Stan told Dipper when he stopped. Dipper gave him an odd look. “Why’s it depend on the age?” Stan had never heard of this before.

Dipper looked at him like he’d just been given a head-scratcher, like he didn’t know what to say. ...Well, Stan didn’t know what his business partner was gonna say either, so they were even there. “Babies can’t use pitchforks. They’re too small and don’t have the proper hand-eye coordination or musculature development to use them properly. Young toddlers… _might_ be able to use them as toys? Toy versions of them? Not _actual_ tools,” Dipper said, frowning as he leaned back in his chair. “That would be far too dangerous.”

“And teenagers? Why go smaller for them?” Stan prompted him, jotting a couple things down ( _safety, toys for kids, baby stuff is hard?_ ).

“Well, younger teens wouldn’t have enough strength to do much to help out in the yard, and they’d potentially hurt themselves trying to do anything using the normal-sized tools. You could resize them, the same way that people lower basketball nets and scale down things like guitars and violins for middle-school-aged children?” Dipper told him, then cautioned, “But scaling things down is tricky, and most people wouldn’t want to re-buy a new slightly-larger pitchfork every year or two. Some people might not even see the point of buying smaller tools for their kids in the first place. Either way, you’d have a lot of specialty merchandise that would likely be harder to move.”

“Sure, sure,” Stan said, jotting a couple more things down ( _scale down things for smaller people - smaller hands? shorter height? elementary - middle - high school kids? parents want one thing, kids want another? kids don’t like doing yardwork - unless they’re getting paid? summer money?_ ) “What would your sister do with one?”

“What?” Dipper said, then shook himself. “Stan, she doesn’t really do any gardening or yardwork--”

“That’s fine, let’s say you got it for her as a present or something,” Stan said to him, because he’d sold pitchforks to a couple women, sure, but not many, and while the guys usually got chatty about it and said what they wanted them for, bragging about their yards, none of the women had said anything about it at all. Maybe they wanted them for gardening, but maybe they wanted them for something else? “What would she do with it?” If she wouldn’t do yardstuff with it and didn’t want it, would she just pretend to like it for her brother, stick it in the corner, then try and return it later for a refund? Swing it around like an angry villager in a play for a day until her arms got tired? Beat dumb guys off her with it like a baseball bat? _What?_

“Spray-paint it pink and toss glitter all over it,” was the authoritative and almost knee-jerk sounding response that he got out of Dipper, and Stan’s jaw dropped for a moment in shock.

“Wh-- _pink?_ ” Stan said, setting down his pen for a second. “Really?” And glitter? --What was she, twelve? Did girls actually _like_ that stuff still after they got older?

But Dipper nodded at him, then shrugged slightly. “She likes glitter and pink,” Dipper told him matter-of-factly. “If it’s pink and glittery, she usually likes it. If it’s pink and doesn’t have glitter, she’ll coat it with glue and _add_ glitter to it,” Dipper told him.

“And if it’s glittery and not pink?” Stan asked.

Dipper grimaced slightly. “Depends on the thing, but usually she has to remove as much of the glitter as she can first, before spray painting it the color she wants and adding more glitter again. Usually ends up a mess. --Because the original glitter usually gets in the way of having an even coating of spray paint, it needs to be removed, and because the spray paint covers up the rest of the original glitter, she has to add more later,” Dipper explained.

“Huh,” Stan said.

“She’s pretty arts-and-crafts-y,” Dipper noted.

Stan thought about that for a minute (okay, really more like a couple of seconds).

“So… if your sister saw a glittery pink pitchfork and a regular old wooden pitchfork, side-by-side next to each other,” Stan began, “And the glittery pink pitchfork cost more than the regular one--”

“She’d see the glittery pink one, get all excited over it, buy it, and never even think about fixing up the plain one herself, even if it’d cost less for her to do it,” Dipper confirmed, sounding almost amused. “Stanley, are you really thinking about selling _designer pitchforks_ to people in different colors?”

“Designer pitchforks,” Stan repeated, starting to grin, because _there_ was an idea! “One for every day of the week, in every color of the rainbow! Match your outfit in the garden!”

“ _Stan_ ,” Dipper said, not quite laughing.

“Match your shoes?” Stan tried next. “Your hair? ...Eh, needs work.” He jotted down _designer pitchforks = different colors? spray paint? recolor on the spot or beforehand?_ and wondered how long paint took to dry (then crossed out the ‘on the spot’ part). He also wondered if _glitter?_ was a good idea too, then added _camouflage_ , not wanting to leave out the male market, either. “Could you paint pitchforks in camouflage colors for us to sell?” Stan asked Dipper. “That’s not too hard, right? Just adding a bunch of green and brown splotches to it?”

“Are you seri--?” Dipper’s eyebrows vanished into his hair for a moment. “Stan, I’m no artist. Mabel could pull that off, easy, but _I_ can’t--”

“That’s fine; I’ll do it,” Stan told him, jotting a few more things down. (Two or three types of paint would be more expensive than just one, and take longer to do than just a couple swipes at the handle using just one type of paint, but how many people could say they had a camouflage-colored pitchfork? He’d bet they sold like hotcakes!) “How hard could it be?”

Stan had his head down in his writing when he heard Dipper blow out a breath. He looked up to see his business partner looking at him with an expression like he didn’t know what to do with him, but he was smiling at him. “Seriously?” Dipper asked and Stan nodded, then Stan started to feel a little less sure about the whole thing as Dipper let out a light laugh and passed a hand across his eyes. --Was this really a bad idea?

“Oh, hell,” Dipper said, in descending tones. “Stan, you-- _really_.” He let out a sigh, but he still had that odd smile on his face. “You know, if you’re really going to pull an etsy" -- huh? Who was Etsie? -- "and paint these things, you might as well go whole-hog, _pay_ an artist to decorate them up for you with pasture scenes or tulip fields or something, and sell these things like modern art pieces, for people to hang up on their living room walls, for a much higher cost.”

Stan perked up. “You think people would actually buy that?”

Dipper leaned back in his chair and covered his eyes with an arm. “I just made it worse, didn’t I?” he said, except Stan could see that he was grinning, and Stan got the feeling that maybe, just maybe...

“You think this could work?”

Dipper blew out another sigh and straightened up in his chair, uncovering his face again. “Honestly? I’ve seen crazier things in people’s living rooms. Painted pitchforks would be an _improvement_ over most of them. --Though you probably shouldn’t tell your customers that.”

Stan snorted. Well, of course not! Don’t insult your customers, especially when they’re already mad at you -- and definitely don’t insult your not-yet-customers, or they’ll just walk away from you and not buy anything. Even Stan knew that one without anyone having to tell him that.

“Why the obsession with pitchforks all of a sudden?” Dipper asked him.

“The pitchforks sell faster,” Stan told him, as he went back to his calculations on paint and supplies, and ideas on color and other things, like needing paintbrushes. “I make more net off of them than pretty much anything else I’ve ever sold, and the shammies are a close second. The shammies are easier and cheaper to fix, sure,” he hesitated, “Uh, unless the chemical-whatever is expensive.”

“It isn’t,” Dipper reassured him.

“Right,” Stan said. He’d count on that once he saw the bill he’d have to pay -- who knew what Dipper thought was ‘expensive’. “Anyway, the shammies take longer to sell, though, because I’ve always gotta explain ‘em to people, and it’s pretty hit-or-miss when I just walk up to people. But people see the pitchforks, they know what they are right away, and they come to _me_.”

“Makes sense.”

“Be easy enough to repaint the darn things, too,” Stan told him. “Not sure which colors will sell, but I can always repaint the ones that don’t in a color that does. House paint’s cheap.”

“I don’t think you’ll want to use house paint,” Dipper told him. “Not unless it’s the sort of thing that’s used on the outside of the house that resists weathering, and even then… the paint will chip or wear off on people’s hands and work gloves over time; it won’t last.” Dipper shook his head. “You’ll want to use spray paint,” Dipper told him. “At least on the ones that are meant to be _used_ , rather than simply decorative and hung up indoors.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Stan said, making a couple notes. “Spray paint costs more, though,” for a lot less of it, too. “And you lose a lot of it too when you’re spraying things, right? It gets all into the air and onto everything else around it.”

“You might be able to get your hands on the same kind of paint in non-spraypaint form? Buckets instead of aerosol cans? And you would probably only need one very thin coat; it would certainly dry far faster than normal house paint,” Dipper offered up to him as their official science-y chemist person, and Stan made a note to check up on that. “Though I suppose that you would need plastic sheeting for these things regardless, to keep the paint from getting all over the floor as you paint them and they sit there and dry.” Stan made another note.

“Could probably sell nails to go along with ‘em,” Stan thought out loud. “For mounting them to the wall.” He didn’t really want to put out money to pay an artist to pretty them up for him, though. He didn’t like the idea of that, for no other reason then the fact that there would be nothing stopping that same artsy person from taking the idea and running with it -- buying their own pitchforks and making and selling them themselves, cutting him out of the loop and stealing his profits. Best to keep it in-house; if somebody had to paint them up, it might as well be him. ...Heck, maybe he could just draw lines on ‘em, make them paint-by-number, and sell folks the paint to paint them themselves -- to the arts-and-crafts-y ones? Save himself some work.

“You’re really going to do this, aren’t you,” Stan heard Dipper say, and his head came up. He couldn’t help it. And when he saw the look on Dipper’s face, that sort of amused but relaxed smile that he’d seen on Ford’s face how many times when Stan had told him a plan? A smile that went perfectly with the tone he’d just heard, that had sounded exactly like Ford did when he thought Stan was up to ‘some harebrained scheme’ again but was perfectly okay to go along with it, because ‘sure, why not, I don’t have anything to do this afternoon, let’s see how it goes’...

It made his chest ache a little, but… it didn’t hurt as much as he’d thought it would. Maybe because his business partner was looking at him with a little less (read: zero) skepticism where Ford usually had a boatload of it, and was instead looking at him with a lot more of something else instead. ...Whatever it was, it made Stan kind of want to blush a little.

“Uh, well, yeah,” Stan said, scratching at his cheek. “Like you said, that market saturation thing would be a problem pretty soon, if all I was selling these things for was yardwork. But if I’ve got other uses for them, and can get people to buy ‘em for other reasons…” Stan shrugged.

“Oh,” Dipper said, “That’s… a great idea,” and he blinked a couple of times, looking like a lightbulb had suddenly flicked on.

“Well, yeah?” Stan said. “You’re the scientist-inventor who fixes stuff for me, and comes up with the ideas for inventions and stuff for me to sell, and I’m the salesman who sells the stuff and handles the business side of things. That’s what we just did, right?” It seemed simple enough to Stan. Wasn’t that what they had agreed on?

“Comes up with--? I didn’t--” Dipper began, sounding confused, then he looked startled for some reason. “Wait, we were just brainstorming ideas for new products just now?”

“Uh, yeah?” Stan said, because that hadn’t been obvious?

“But I’m terrible at that,” Dipper said next, and Stan just stared at him.

“No, you’re not,” Stan said, feeling kind of weirded out.

“I’m not?” and Dipper actually looked a little red-- wait, was he _blushing?_

“No, you’re not,” Stan repeated, because what the hey? “Who told you that?” Stan sure hadn’t. Dipper was _great_ at this stuff. Maybe needed a little prompting sometimes when he stopped talking, but that was what brainstorming _was_ , right? Stan had done the same thing for Ford plenty of times, for school projects of every type and flavor, except Ford usually jumped all over the place on him (the jerk, had he done it on purpose?). Stan could actually follow Dipper when _he_ said stuff.

“My sister,” Dipper told him, looking kind of stunned. “She says all my ideas are boring and dumb, and--” Dipper’s face darkened. “She’s _right_. I--”

“--Hey, hey, don’t knock dumb and boring,” Stan told him, and Dipper stopped short, looking surprised. “Dumb and boring sells!” Dipper stared at him. “Seriously, it does!” Did Dipper not know this? How did he not know this? I mean, it was kind of a selling-thing more than a business or a science-y thing, sure, but still! “Most people don’t want an adventure, they just want to buy a bunch of simple stuff that they don’t have to think about, that either works the way they want it to, or just sits up there on a mantlepiece and looks pretty.” The heck was wrong with this guy’s sister? “If anybody tells you differently, they’re lying to you.”

“That’s not--” Dipper seemed to shake himself. “Look, you just haven’t seen Mabel and Grunkle-- you haven’t seen them when they’re brainstorming together. They’re a _lot_ better at this stuff than I am, really,” Dipper told him, looking kind of low. “I can’t even keep up with them.”

“Well, then they’re _doing it wrong_ ,” Stan told him, because they were if they were leaving him out of it. “It’s not about being fast, it’s about getting good ideas,” Stan told him, and yeah it felt weird repeating something to somebody else that Ford had told him once, but heck with it. If his partner kept on thinking he couldn’t brainstorm when he could, that was a problem, and he’d say what he needed to say to make that _not_ a problem, okay?

Dipper turned red again.

“Seriously, you’re doing just fine with me, right?” Stan told him.

“...Maybe?” Dipper said, looking not so sure. “I… don’t exactly know which... ‘ideas’ were helping you, or what you were looking for, though,” Dipper told him, with an honesty that was so painful for Stan to see, it almost made Stan wince.

“That’s _my_ job,” Stan told him, making no bones about it -- because that was his job. “I know what sells. You give me ideas, I’ll figure out what stuff’s the easiest to do that’ll make us the most money.” Heck, Dipper had practically said that himself earlier, when they’d been talking about Stan being the one to buy the supplies Dipper needed to fix things for them. “Okay?”

Dipper got sort of a small smile. “Okay.”

“Seriously, as long as we can work together, we’re good, right? So we’re good,” Stan told him. “And it’s not like those two are here to be doing whatever, so who cares about that? Besides, you’re my business partner, not them. --And hey, if they aren’t here going a mile-a-minute and being impossible to work with, it means I don’t have to cut ‘em in on anything, either,” he added with a grin and a wink, getting a startled smile out of his partner, too. “It’s fine. Yeah?”

Dipper nodded at him, still looking a little red. “Y--yeah.”

Man, if that was how all geeky-nerd types got treated by people -- told that what they’d thought up was boring and dumb, no matter how old they got? …Well, then Ford totally deserved what was coming to him. But Stan’s business partner sure didn’t. This guy was _nice_. Brought him food and everything. Fixed his stuff, told him about useful business stuff, gave him good ideas for things…

...yeah, okay, maybe there was a _reason_ that the guy needed a gun and had to know self-defense. Guy was _too_ nice; he’d needed something to offset the ‘nice’ so people wouldn’t take advantage of him all the time, probably. Whoever had told him to do _that_ had been looking out for him. That actually kind of made sense, now.

(...yeah, okay, so it still didn’t really explain the whole travelling-places and shooting-people-to-free-drugged-up-slaves thing, exactly, but maybe ‘nice’ sometimes came with a willingness to shoot bad guys and get angry about drugs and the mob, _and_ a gun to do something about it?)

“Okay, so, ideas,” Stan said, looking to Dipper. “Got any more?”

“Uh.” It took Dipper a minute, and he looked a little nervous as he said, “Does that cheap dye for the shammies come in any other colors?”

Stan grinned.

“It sure does,” he told Dipper, because _designer shammies?_ Like maybe designer towels? --He could get behind that!

\---

Well, one thing was for certain -- Stanley Pines in any variation was _very_ charismatic. Here Dipper had gone into this thinking that he was going to do his best to teach Stan that he was not dumb, no matter what anyone else said or didn’t say about him, and here Stan was making _him_ feel not-dumb about things, too.

He really should’ve known better. Grunkle Stan was pretty generous with anything and everything he had with the people he cared about (except maybe money), and he’d been through a lot of horrible things when he’d been younger. This Stan _was_ that ‘younger’, and because he hadn’t had the grunkley-ness practically beaten into him by life’s hard knocks yet, he was breathtakingly generous with the people who were trying to be generous with him, just as easy as breathing almost.

Dipper had just gotten done with talking through things with Stan about new products. ‘Inventions’, as Stan also put it, and Dipper wasn’t about to correct him on that front for several reasons. And frankly, all it had consisted of was Stan asking him a couple of questions and Dipper talking to Stan about some of the facts and things he knew -- with Stan prompting him to keep going at times. And then Stan had taken and sifted through all of those ‘ideas’ that ‘ _Dipper_ ’ had had, talked with Dipper a little more about some of them, and then Stan had turned them into _**gold**_. Dipper honestly had no idea how Stan was doing it, and Dipper was sitting there, watching and listening to and talking with him as he did it!

Stan was a genius at this. And Dipper was really starting to think that, when he got home, he was going to have to kick Grunkle Stan in the pants and demand to know why he’d _only_ stopped with the Mystery Shack! Whatever random scams he’d used to do on the side hardly counted as a second business enterprise, not when he could have been--

\-- _not_ spending his time working on the portal to get Great-Uncle Ford back? Dear Axolotl, that whole thing really had been a tragedy, hadn’t it, in more ways than one?

Anyway, right now they were sitting on ten solid, good, new, _viable_ ideas that were… well, they were not quite market-saturation-proof, but they were still a lot better than what Stan had had to work with before, and all _without_ Stan having to make any large changes to his current product line:  
\-- Designer pitchforks, in different colors, for actual use.  
\-- Painted pitchforks, with nails to hang them up on the wall.  
\-- Shammies in multiple colors, and maybe some patterned designs if they could figure that one out without it coming out looking horrible (to be redyed a very dark green or black again in the worst case).  
\-- Origami boxes of several shapes and sizes, because ‘colored paper’ was cheap. (Stan had seen some wrapping paper at a deep discount at a store yesterday near one of his usual haunts, and the origami idea had been prompted by a Stan-proposed question of ‘what are some things you could make out of a lot of interesting-looking paper really quickly and easily, that could sit on a shelf and look pretty?’)  
\-- Kitchen magnets (from the same wood scraps being used to fix the pitchforks, some sanding, a little paint, several sheets of long magnetic strips that could be cut up into smaller little magnets that Stan had also found on-offer in that same odd little store, and a dab of glue).  
\-- Plastic egg “surprises” (since Stan had found a place trying to get rid of a glut of the things post-Easter that had ‘practically been willing to pay _him_ to cart them away to the dump for them’) that they were going to sell at $1 a pop for a literally obscene amount of net profit, filling them each with either a tiny dreamcatcher (quick and easy, made from cheap yarn and twigs), a braided yarn necklace with a cheap bead or two in the center (about the same level of difficulty, only faster), or a small keychain (made from yarn or leather, whatever they could get, and some of those crazy-cheap metal key rings).  
\-- Cloth drawstring bags, both large and small, and middling-sized drawstring backpacks, which counted as three separate products, really. (Dipper was really mentally thanking his sister for having forced him to help her with so many of her arts and crafts projects so often in the past, now.)  
\-- And the StanVac as the coup de grace (though it still needed some work, since they needed to figure out a steady supplier for the parts they needed to make it).  
All of the newer things were the kinds of stuff that could made easily, relatively quickly and cheaply, then folded flat (if need be), stuffed into a box or a backpack, and carted around all day -- though Dipper doubted that it would take Stan that long to sell a backpack full of those things. Everything would be sold as singletons or in small-package groupings except for the “surprise” eggs. Those, they were planning on selling by the boxful to one of the local game arcades, to the ticket-exchange counter, as new prizes for some of the games or high scores for others. If Stan couldn’t sell them there, then there were a few shops that wouldn’t find them out of place as part of their offerings, though they’d have to drop the price to around $0.25-$0.30 per egg or so; they could get away with the $1 price tag with the arcade, because the arcade would effectively be ‘selling’ the lowest-tier prizes for $2-$5 a piece or more, depending on how hard the tickets were to get. They couldn’t get away with that at the other stores, because neither could those shopkeepers -- they’d probably only be able to sell them at around $0.50 each.

They were also going to divvy up the production work between them, to make it all easier to track and make. Dipper would teach Stan how to repair the pitchforks (for a lower but “forever” net cost) and how to make the magnets (with a similar net payoff), and also how to fold the origami boxes (something that Dipper was not going to charge for, since he’d learned that from a library book -- one which Stan would be perfectly capable of reading and getting different designs out of himself if they really wanted to waste the time on that). Dipper was also going to show Stan how to make all of the ‘surprises’ for the eggs, but Dipper would be the one making the dreamcatchers this time, while Stan took on both of the braided items. Dipper himself would produce the cloth bags and backpacks, out of cloth material and yarn, and using a needle and thread and scissors, all of which Stan would buy himself and supply for him. And they would save working on the new multicolored shammies for later, because the other colors of cheap dye would take about two days for Stan to order in more of, and it would take another night or two for Dipper to test and modify the fixant solution for each one, as would likely be necessary.

After they’d finished determining their schedules for tomorrow -- both Stan’s work at supply procurement, and his and Dipper’s work in the evening -- it hadn’t taken Dipper much longer to finish up his work on the last few remote controllers. He’d sighed, stretched in place, and packed everything back up into his bag, then pushed back the chair and stood up to remove his gun to re-enable it.

“Um,” said Stan, and Dipper smiled at him.

“Just need to fix this before I go,” Dipper told him, pulling it free from the strip at the back of his belt.

“Can I see?” was the tentative ask from his seventeen-year-old partner, and Dipper paused for a moment.

“You can look, but I’ll need you to keep your hands well-clear,” Dipper told him, somewhat surprised at Stan’s sudden interest, as he set the holstered gun down onto the table in front of him. “If you jostle my elbow, and I accidentally end up grounding this thing out, I won’t be well-pleased.”

“What, uh, what happens if you do that?” Stan asked him, standing up and putting his ledger and pen down on the bed behind him. “Will it explode?”

Dipper managed to stifle his laugh to a smile. “Nothing so dramatic,” he told Stanley, putting his hands on his hips. “It’ll just discharge completely, like putting a wire across two battery leads.”

“You can explode batteries doing that,” Stan put out there as he inched himself closer, frowning.

“Yes,” Dipper allowed, “But I tend to design my tools better than that. I would be stuck walking back to my hotel room tonight effectively unarmed if that happened, though,” Dipper informed him, “Since I don’t have my spare charger on me.” He’d left it in his backpack. It was usually something that he could easily slip into a pocket, but with the modifications he’d had to make for it and add to it, in order to connect it to the “human-normal” 120-volt wall outlets of this dimension, it was more than a bit unwieldy now as-is.

Dipper ran his thumb across the passive biometric scanner on the flap, and flipped open the holster as Stan took another step forward.

\---

And then it happened. The thing that Dipper should’ve known would happen sooner or later, with his luck fluctuating the way it was right now, still.

Stan tripped.

\---


	2. Chapter 2

\---

Stan wasn’t really sure what had happened. One minute he’d been talking with Dipper and walking forward, and the next… it was like he’d tripped over his own two feet or somethin’.

And then he’d nearly tumbled head-first into the side of the table.

He’d barely gotten his hands out in front of him in time. He’d literally been keeping them held behind his back because he’d been _that_ worried about accidentally touching the gun.

But yeah, he’d been about to take a header into the table. And then he hadn’t.

Right now, he was staring up at the ceiling and felt hands on him at both his shoulders. He was being held up at his shoulders. Seriously, he was hanging in mid-air, and holy shit, he hadn’t even seen the guy move.

...And if he’d ever needed to know how strong the guy was, well, this answered it, because the next thing Dipper did was practically pick him straight up and set him back down on his feet, all without breaking a sweat. He didn’t even hear the guy grunt or anything, and Stan knew how much he weighed.

Stan opened his mouth to apologize, but Dipper beat him to it with a, “Stanley, are you all right?!”

“I, uh.” Stan didn’t really know what to say, with Dipper looking at him all freaked out and concerned like that, other than to give him a weak, “...I’m fine?”

Dipper blew out a breath and slowly let go of him. “I… I thought you were going to crack your head open on the side of the desk!” he heard Dipper say, as Stan raised a hand to his own forehead.

“I’m, uh, I’m… I didn’t hit it, you caught me.” Stan tried to wave it off, as he dropped his hand. And, seriously, what kind of guy did that, instead of just watching it happen and laughing at him for being such a clutz? Besides this guy right here?

“Yes, I, well,” seemed to be all Dipper had to say about that, while Stan glanced around to try and figure out the damage his own stupid self had done this time.

...Well, the table was knocked out of whack, but the gun was still on top of the table and mostly in its holster. So at least he hadn’t accidentally touched that! But… Stan looked down because, what was he gripping in his other hand?

Oh. When he’d tried to grab the side of the table and just kept slipping and falling, that was because he hadn’t grabbed the side of the table at all, he’d just grabbed Dipper’s nerdy-awesome coat.

Then Stan looked down.

And he knew when Dipper looked down too, because the guy literally stopped breathing right next to him.

The walkie-talkie looking thing that Dipper had laid out on top of his coat -- next to the holstered gun? -- was on the floor now, and the side of it was all busted open, with parts sticking out.

And when Stan looked up at Dipper, and saw how absolutely dead-white his face was, it was in that moment that he realized that the most important thing that had been on that table _hadn’t_ been the gun.

It was in that moment that Stan knew that he had messed up _again_.

He saw it in Dipper’s shocked and horrified stare. The way his jaw was hanging open slightly. The way he just wasn’t moving at all.

...and in how hard it was for Dipper to take in his next breath and start breathing again, in a sort of gasping choke.

“I’m sorry,” Stan managed to strangle out of his own throat, but it wasn’t enough, it was never going to be enough, he was done. He was done and he knew it, this guy was going to turn right around and kill him, because Stan knew, just _knew_ with the way Dipper was reacting, that that walkie-talkie thing, whatever it was, was _**important**_. And he was going to deserve it, to get shot for breaking this thing and screwing everything up for his very very dangerous partner, and… he couldn’t even find it in him to try and run away from it. It was his fault, and he was doomed.

“I--” Dipper seemed to pause and try and drag in another breath. “It--”

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Stan tried again, feeling absolute despair, because the guy looked like someone had literally _died_ right in front of him just now, and it wasn’t getting any better--

“It’s fine,” Stan heard Dipper choke out, and Stan stared as Dipper gulped in another breath, because _there was no way in hell this was fine,_ Stan could _see_ that it _wasn’t fine!_

Stan almost said, ‘Dipper’, but all he could do was stare.

He didn’t try to make excuses or blow it all off. He didn’t dare. ~~(And, frankly, he knew better, now, after what had happened with Ford before.)~~

“It’s fine,” he heard Dipper say again, and Stan had thought what had happened with _Ford_ was bad, but this was fucking _horrifying_. The guy wasn’t even angry at him. Dipper’s voice was faint, almost breathy, and it was just… He was still in freaking shock over everything.

Stan was shaking. He felt like he was going to throw up.

Stan started to shift in place, to try and back away slowly from this ~~electronic murder~~ crime scene…

“-- ** _DON’T MOVE_**.”

Stan froze in place.

Dipper had a hand clamped down on his shoulder, and his grip was like steel.

“I-- I just--” Dipper pulled in a breath again, his head tilted downwards, and he seemed to swallow weakly. “I… need you to not move for a little bit, alright Stan?”

Stan nodded at him jerkily. At that moment, he didn’t think he could have said no, even if his life depended on it.

“I just…” Dipper pulled in another breath. “...need a minute.” Another breath, and his voice was just all over the place. “I…” Another breath. “It’s fine.” And... the color was slowly returning to Dipper’s face. Stan stared as Dipper pulled in another breath, and started to look less freaked out. “It’s fine.”

And then Dipper said something that made no sense to Stan at all.

“…What?” Stan said. Because… because he hadn’t heard that right. Had he?

“I can fix it,” Dipper repeated, words that had sounded completely foreign to Stan. “It’s… fine. I can fix it.” He felt Dipper straighten slightly in place, and realized that the grip Dipper had on his shoulder hadn’t just been to hold him in place; Dipper had been leaning on him with a lot of his weight. Like his legs had almost given out on him, maybe.

It wasn’t Stan that had been shaking (or maybe Stan had been shaking _too_ , but…) -- Stan realized he could feel Dipper shaking, as the guy slowly removed his hand from Stan’s shoulder.

“I can fix it,” he heard Dipper repeat, and he watched as Dipper lifted a hand to his forehead and pushed his fingers up into his hair further, kind of nervously. Stan caught a glimpse of some kind of red mark on his forehead as he dropped his hand again. “It… It might take me a few days… maybe a week at most. It’s just… there are one or two components that…” God, the guy was rambling. “I just need to… You need to stay put, okay?” He watched Dipper run a hand over his face. “Okay. Okay.”

He watched and didn’t move as Dipper stepped forward, with an almost torturous slowness. He watched as Dipper carefully reached down, slid down into a tentative squat and slid his way forward across the dirty carpet towards the wrecked device, like he needed to sneak up on it carefully almost, or it’d get away from him.

Stan watched as Dipper carefully, oh so carefully, picked up the three small components that had fallen out of the device onto the carpet, then pulled his hands back and placed what he’d picked up into his shirt pocket. He watched as Dipper reached forward and cupped his hands around that device like it was made of broken glass, and slowly lifted it up. He watched as Dipper slowly rose and then turned, just as slowly and smoothly set the broken device down onto the table in front of him, next to the gun.

He watched as Dipper moved his hands away, then braced them on the tabletop on either side of the device and leaned forward, dropping his head on his neck.

“Okay. ...Okay.” Dipper stood there like that for what felt like an age, and then… “Stanley?”

“...Yeah?”

“You can move now.”

Stan blinked at him. Dipper was looking over his shoulder at him. He was still a little pale, and his expression looked really strained, but… Dipper was giving him a smile. A weak smile.

Stan wasn’t sure how he managed the three steps backwards before his knees hit the side of the bed and his legs collapsed under him, but he did, because then he was sitting on the side of the bed.

“I’m sorry,” Stan repeated, and Dipper just blinked at him. Then Dipper looked very, very tired, and let out a long breath. He pushed off of the table and straightened a bit.

“ _I’m_ sorry,” Dipper said, then sighed tiredly and rubbed his fingers over his eyes. “It’s my own fault, really. I shouldn’t have left it lying out like that.”

Stan stared at him. “ _What?_ ”

“I panicked a bit there. I just… didn’t want to have to worry about you accidentally tripping again and kicking it or something.”

“I’m sorry,” Stan said again, still feeling shaky despite sitting down, and when Dipper held out his hand towards him, Stan stared at it like he didn’t know what was going on. Because he didn’t know what was going on. Did… did Dipper want him to pay for…? Uh, the supplies to fix it, maybe? He-- shit, how much would that even _cost?_ Did-- did he have that much on him?

“Stan,” he heard Dipper say quietly, and Stan brought his head up immediately, because-- “Could I have my coat back now, please?”

“...What?” Stan said, blinking up at him. And it took him a moment.

Then Stan realized that he’d never let go of his partner’s long nerdy-awesome coat.

\--He brought his hand up quickly to hold it out to him.

Dipper had a sort of odd scrunched forehead look going on, and a weird sort of smile going, as he… took his coat back from Stan’s hand. He did it _gently_ , with that weird look going on, and… Stan felt a little like crying, even if he didn’t know why.

It wasn’t until after Dipper had tossed the coat over his shoulders, sliding his hands and arms back into the sleeves, that Stan’s brain kind of woke up again.

“ _\--Wait!!_ ” Stan said in a panic, because-- shit! And Dipper stopped, looking over at him curiously, but, _shit_ \-- “What if-- were there parts that got caught on that, and--” Shit!! Why hadn’t he said something _before_ \-- anything that might’ve been stuck on that coat of his could be halfway across the room now, under the bed even--

Stan froze where he’d started to bend over to look at the floor, as Dipper’s hands came down on both of his shoulders.

“Stan, breathe,” Dipper -- _Dipper_ \-- told him. Told _him_ to do. When _he’d_ been the one to-- “It’s all right.”

“I broke your thing,” Stan breathed out at him, and no, this was stupid, he was stupid, why did he say that, that was just going to get Dipper angry with him, and he-- he even had a gun, he-- he--

“I can fix it, Stan,” Dipper told him, shaking him by the shoulders a little bit. “I promise you that. I--” Stan heard Dipper pull in a breath. “Stan, please sit up. And look at me.” Stan looked up at him. “I’m sorry,” Dipper told him. “I overreacted.” And Dipper looked-- not freaked out or scared like he had before. He just looked… really tired. And kind of... “I feel rather stupid, in retrospect, for reacting so badly. I...” Dipper let out a slight, pained-sounding laugh (Stan knew that laugh, Ford did that when--) and Dipper rubbed his hands side to side on Stan’s shoulders a bit. “I really can fix it. There’s only the one piece of it -- technically two pieces, really -- that I can’t replace. And they can’t really break,” Dipper told him. “I just… need them. Okay? That’s why I was worried about the parts that managed to escape the outer casing. But the device on the whole seems to be largely intact, and the parts that came out of it aren’t those ones, so...” Dipper trailed off, making an odd gesture into the air with his one hand.

Stan stared up at him. His partner didn’t look so pale now.

“I-- Everything else can be fixed, Stan,” Dipper told him, pulling back his other hand from Stan’s shoulder completely. “Truly. It just might take me a little while, depending on the level of damage to the internal components, and how many of them I might need to repair or replace--”

“--Check it,” Stan said, feeling sick. “P-please,” he managed to get out. And… for some reason Dipper blinked at him, looking a little startled, and-- Stan quickly followed it up with his motor mouth getting away from him with, “I’ll pay for the-- solder and stuff. Whatever you need to fix it, I just-- might need a little time,” Stan darn near begged. Because he couldn’t lose-- He didn’t want to lose his business partner over this. He just _couldn’t_. He--

...didn’t know why Dipper was looking at him like he was understanding something, but the nerdy kinda-scary-with-a-gun scientist guy was. Heck if Stan knew _what_ it was, though. Maybe how stupidly desperate he was to keep around the only guy who actually seemed willing to help him with all of this stuff, and it kind of hit Stan in that moment that he didn’t want to do this _alone_ \--

“You don’t have to pay for anything, Stan,” he was told. “It truly was my error for setting it out like that.” Dipper paused for a moment, shifting in place. “I appreciate the concern, but I do have the funds to cover the repairs for myself. I--” Dipper sighed for some reason then, and told him, while looking back at the walkie-talkie looking thing, “Checking it all over right now _is_ a good idea though, thank you,” Dipper said to him, and _that_ just made Stan’s gut churn a little worse, because--

“Don’t _thank_ me for pulling your thing off’a the table,” Stan said, hunching his shoulders.

To this, Dipper just looked over at him, as he walked back over to the table, and told him, “Well, technically all you pulled off the table was my coat. The rest of it was simply… incidental?”

Stan couldn’t help it. The guy was flipping _teasing_ him over this shit now, and--

Stan ran a hand over his face, fell backwards on the bed, and just _groaned_.

Stan heard the movement of things, like cloth, and a sort of tinkling-tapping that happened -- probably the guy getting the stuff back out of his pocket. He heard something else set down on the table after that.

“I’m sorry I scared you, Stan,” he heard Dipper say quietly, and that was just a laugh riot and a half, because--

“--Who’s scared? _I’m_ not scared; _you’re_ scared,” Stan said in nervous reaction. Then he almost cringed at himself, because what the heck, great going Stanley. Stan shoved himself up, ready to have to apologize again, but Dipper…

...was just still standing over there, leaning over the table, with a small screwdriver in-hand. And the guy just gave him a rueful look over his shoulder and said, “I suppose I was.”

Stan sat there and stared. Because Dipper had just… _admitted_ it. He’d just _admitted_ it like it was… like it was okay to just _say_ stuff like that.

“I suppose it would probably help for me to explain,” Dipper told him next, and _yeah_ , Stan sure could use an explanation on-- “This is a communications device that I can use to contact my sister.” Oh. Oh, okay. Not, uh, not what Stan had thought he was gonna be explaining, but-- wait.

“You can’t just call her up on the phone?” Stan asked him, confused as heck. Because Dipper freaking out over not calling his sister (who _he_ apparently got along with) on some special device thing didn’t make sense to him when he could just--

“Unfortunately, no,” Dipper said as he worked away with his little screwdriver, and okay, now Stan got it, kind of. “I, well… suffice it to say, I can’t get in direct contact with her any other way at-present. She has a matching device,” Stan was told, “And the encryption capabilities of these devices make it impossible for anyone else to listen in on our communications or track the two of us, when we are using them.”

Stan thought over this one.

“This is because of those slaver guys, isn’t it,” Stan said next. Because it sort of made sense. “You don’t want them going after her.”

Dipper stopped what he was doing, just sort of paused in place.

“Ah, well,” Stan heard him say. “That _is_ one of the reasons, yes. ...Though, to be clear, if they ever _did_ find her, I think I’d be more worried about _them_ surviving the encounter, than her,” Dipper said warmly, like… like he was proud of her? Or like he knew some kind of secret, and that… wow.

...Wait.

“Hold up,” Stan said, waving his hands back and forth. “Are you telling me that your _sister_ is the ass-kicker outta the two of you?” And… woah. He was pretty sure _that_ kind of grin was a-- “That’s a yes, isn’t it.” Shit. Ho _ly_ \-- “That’s a yes?”

“Yes, Stan,” Dipper told him, and he sounded amused, what the-- “That’s a yes.”

“Okay, I’m kinda scared of your sister already,” Stan admitted without really thinking about it too hard (and that got a laugh out of Dipper for some reason). Because, hey, if this guy carried a gun and broke up slave rings _just because_ , or whatever, then-- “What does _she_ carry? A bigger gun?”

“A grappling hook,” Dipper told him with warmth in his tone, which just left Stan confused. “And you don’t have to worry, Stan,” his partner told him reassuringly, as he set down his screwdriver, “She’d love you. --The first thing she’d do upon meeting you would be to run up to you and _hug_ you, I swear.”

...Yeahhhh, Stan wasn’t too sure about that. Especially not after he’d just broken his partner’s communication device so that he couldn’t talk to her anymore for… heck, had Dipper said it could take a whole week? ...Yeah, he was toast.

Then something occurred to him.

“How often do you talk to her on that thing?” Stan asked his partner carefully. Because how mad Dipper’s butt-kicking sister might be with him would _probably_ have a lot to do with how many calls they might miss because of him. And it was occurring to Stan that if Dipper was so sure about that, that maybe that was because she’d told him that? Which would mean that his partner had been talking about him with her? And that made Stan feel a little... weird. Kind of fidgety, maybe. And a little weird in his chest.

“Oh, once every week or so,” Dipper told him, turning back towards the device. “Though it’s been closer to two weeks, this time,” his partner told him, and Stan could sort of hear the frown, which -- _great_ \-- two weeks? _That_ meant that they were in the hole by about a week _already_ , so there was _no way_ this guy's sister wouldn't be pissed at at least _one_ of them here (maybe he could get away with blaming it all on Dipper, instead?), but… okay, so he _hadn’t_ told his sister about him yet? (That… didn’t make any sense. If Dipper hadn’t told her about him yet, then how could he be so sure that she would...? Did she just go around hugging random strangers all the time? Stan stared at Dipper as his partner carefully pried off the top of the communications device thing with his hands.) “But that’s likely because--” And Dipper got the top off finally.

And paused, staring down at it.

Dipper wasn’t moving.

...Something was wrong.

And Stan started to realize exactly how wrong that something was, when he saw how very carefully Dipper placed the top of that device thing down on the table next to the broken parts that had come out of the thing.

“...How bad is it,” Stan said with a feeling of dread. Because how many parts in there had gotten busted up?

There was a pause.

“It’s gone,” Dipper said to him, finally, and Stan…

“...I don’t know what that means,” Stan admitted. Should he-- nope. No, Stan was staying sitting on the bed. Last time he tried to get up, he’d screwed up and broken his thing. If he went over there to try and look at it himself… heck, he probably wouldn’t understand what he was seeing anyway.

“It’s… _gone_ ,” Dipper repeated. “The… the part that…” Dipper sounded shocky, and Stan saw him run a hand up through his hair, and…

Then Stan got it.

“ _Shit_ ,” Stan cursed, pulling his feet up off of the carpet immediately and onto the bed. “--What does it _**look**_ like?” Stan asked him, scanning the carpet and-- shit, what if he’d _stepped_ on it! Stan quickly checked over the bottoms of his shoes for anything weird-looking--

“It’s a jagged purple stone that-- Stan, no,” he heard Dipper say, as he stopped looking over his shoes and started scanning the floor again, “It’s about half the size of your thumb. The dent in the casing wasn’t that large, it _couldn’t_ have fallen out; it's not broken into _pieces_ in here either, the space that holds it is just... _empty_. It's just--” and Stan looked up to see that nerdy ‘I’m searching for an answer here, because _this doesn’t make any sense_ ’ look that Ford had used to get sometimes (but usually only about people doing dumb, hateful things ~~to him~~ ), and...

“--I didn’t take it,” Stan said. Because that felt like a _really_ important thing to say to Dipper just then. Because he hadn’t. He hadn’t done that. He hadn’t take it. He wouldn’t _do_ that to somebody who actually _liked_ their twin sibling and wanted to _talk_ to them, he--

And Dipper just turned to him, with a puzzled look on his face, and told him, “I know you didn’t, Stan,” like… like that was just a _given_ to him, or something. He said it like most people would say that the sky was blue, or the grass was green, and _Stan didn’t know what to do with that_ , he just-- “You couldn’t have taken it,” Dipper continued, “I don’t--” Dipper frowned, turning to look back down at it, one hand on the table. “It hasn’t even been out of my _sight_ or off of my person,” Dipper told him next. “Not since--”

And Dipper stopped. He stopped talking. And he got that mind-racing look that Ford had got sometimes, when he--

Stan watched as Dipper turned back towards the communications device thing, and all the part of it, sitting down on the table in front of him.

“Not since…” Dipper said next, and _that_ sounded like the guy was aiming a gun, staring down the sights of a barrel at...

“Oh, that backstabbing _shelna’k_ ,” Stan heard Dipper breathe out next.

...whoever had messed with that thing first, before Stan had ever gotten near enough to screw up and ‘help’ drop the thing, breaking it half-open.

He watched as Dipper slowly, carefully, braced both his hands down on the table, on either side of all of those parts. He watched Dipper think for another few moments, watched him from behind...

And he didn’t need to hear Dipper say it out loud to know, “I’m going to kill her.” Stan saw Dipper square his shoulders, raise his head, and when Dipper said, “Nobody comes between me and my sister. **Nobody.** ” Stan _knew_ that the nice guy standing right in front of him? Would punch Death itself straight in the face and beat it into the _floor_ if he had to, to do it.

The lady, whoever she was, who had double-crossed his partner? Was dead meat.

The scariest thing about it all? Was that Dipper said it all in almost conversational tones. He didn’t raise his voice or yell like his pa did. He didn’t lob angry accusations around at the wrong people like Ford had.

And he sure as hell didn’t just stand there and fret about what to do like his ma did, when something went really wrong.

What Dipper _did_ do was… different. So different that Stan had no idea what to do next.

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...aaaand now I've run out of backlog plus new recent writing! (No worries, I have my ideas for where this is going to go next, though. Should be an interesting ride... ;) :)


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